
4 *SA a rpen ing th eir arrows. ' ' 

— Raphael Mengi 



Loving goes ry haps, 

^ So^TE C-L'PID K IEXS WITH AEROWS. 
S().\rR WITH TRAPS." 

— ' Much Ado about Nothijstg." 



LOVE 

AND ITS AFFINITIES. 



BY \L- 
GEORGE F. BUTLER. M. D. 



t^* t^*<ij^ 



S* Amor non e; che dunque e quel c hi* i* sento ? 

— Petrarca. S 102, 
Oh Love, if thou art not, what ails my heart ? 
But if create,— thy nature then reveal: 
If fair, — with mortal pain why o'er me steal ? 
If ill,— so sweet a torment why impart? 

—Trans. Susan Wollaston, 

«^* {^* t^w 

E cieco chi s' abusa 

De tuoi doni innocenti; 

E fanciul chi t' accusa 

Del proprio error. Tu 1' universo annodi 

In concorde amista. Tutto germoglia, 

Tutto ride per te. Di te la terra, 

Di te s' adorna il cielo; e piu che mai 

Og-gi onor degli Dei, 

Delizia oggi del mondo, Amor, tu sei. 

— Metastasio. // Triunfo d 1 Amore, 



CHICAGO: 

G. P. Engelhard & Company, 
1899. 






Copyright, 1899 
By G, P. Engelhard & Company, Chicago, 




SEP 1 J 1967 








PREFACE. 



In presenting the following pages the author's desire has 
been, not so much to offer an empirical, scientific considera- 
tion of human passion, as a philosophical study of Love and 
its relationship to psychical, as well as physiological phenom- 
ena, with which the most exalted sentiment of sexual attrac- 
tion is closely allied. With this object in view, the require- 
ments of truth and candor exacted a perfectly frank and 
serious treatment of the subject, a portrayal of Lust and of a 
polluted imagination being as essential to complete delinea- 
tion as shadows to a picture. The grosser features of the 
sexual instinct — of itself ideally pure— revolting as they may 
appear, have therefore not been disguised. Yet, as the stain- 
less Nymphaea lifts its radiant beauty above the noisome 
ooze from which it springs, the motif 'of the present monograph 
is an ascent from lower to higher, purer phases of passion — 
an aspiration whose heavenward struggle and stately flores- 
cence are the crown and glory of mortal love. 

Inadequate as must be so brief and imperfect a contempla- 
tion of his theme, the author trusts that here and there some 
passing suggestion may prove inspiring to those whose faith 
in human goodness has not been chilled by the mournful les- 
sons of observation or experience, however disheartening they 
may have been, and that the sweeter, holier emotions of the 
soul herein depicted may receive just homage, 
Chicago, Hi., April, 1899. 



INTRODUCTION, 



The subject of the present thesis is one which 
lies at the foundation of society; permeates, albeit 
unconsciously, the thoughts, the aspirations, and the 
spiritual welfare of mankind, and forms, as it were, 
the woof into which are woven the intricate threads of 
human existence. The suggestions arising from a 
thoughtful contemplation of the triune motive — Lust, 
Love, and Religion — are endless, as they are of pro- 
found interest, the field covered by a consideration 
of these component forces embracing alike primitive 
man and the latest offspring of our race. 

It is consequently impossible to present in a few 
general observations the manifold phases of so vast 
an inquiry. That the world at large dwells in com- 
parative ignorance of its secret stimuli to thought 
and action, so far as they affect sexual passion, is to 
be deplored, since an ampler knowledge of its psy- 
chological raison d 1 etre and attendant phenomena 
might clarify the obscure medium in which many a 
pure and virtuous life is shrouded. The mental 
anguish often occasioned by lack of a just apprehen- 
sion of ideas and their logical connection is un- 
speakable — most of all, when a clear conception of 



the inviolable laws governing an entity so complex 
as man is essential to human happiness. 

The theme of our discussion, therefore, is of so vital 
an import, that it demands a searching inquiry re- 
garding occult manifestations of passions subtly 
interwoven, their analysis well-nigh evading the 
most competent scrutiny. It is important that the 
investigation should be conducted in accordance 
with the scientific methods applicable to all examina- 
tion of philosophic truth, with the sole object of 
tracing, so far as our knowledge permits, the reaction 
of animal upon spiritual life, and, vice versa, the 
influence of sublimated passion and imaginative 
purity upon sensual man. 

That the highest, most sacred phases of religious 
emotion should be inextricably involved in the prob- 
lem attests the magnitude of the task. Yet, not- 
withstanding many perplexities, distinguished schol- 
ars, guided by the animus of candor, have devoted 
untiring zeal to the elucidation of the subject, either 
in part or in its entirety. The history and signif- 
icance of phallic worship have been exhaustively 
treated by authorities of recognized force and vera- 
city; ancient writers, even as eye-witnesses, have 
been abundantly cited, and every vestige of phalli- 
cism identified with modern times skilfully collated. 
It is to be regretted that the psychological coordina- 



tion between evolutions of human passion apparently 
dissociate, should have received but passing atten- 
tion, since it is in this aspect of sexual philosophy 
that mankind is most deeply and directly interested. 

Together with close correlation, however, there 
are points of wide divergence in the exegesis and ex- 
pression of man's sexual and spiritual nature, which 
require the closest study to define. It cannot be 
reasonably averred that even civilized man has by 
any means outlived his brute instincts ; yet a com- 
prehensive view of society, as to-day constituted, 
affords ample hope of improvement in our race — pos- 
sibly tending towards the ideal evolution glowingly 
portrayed in the closing chapters of Wallace's " Nat- 
ural Selection." 

The writer of this brief consideration of the topic 
in hand lays no claim to special originality or force 
of argument, merely desiring to contribute to a dis- 
cussion of phenomena which in the line of profes- 
sional experience have seriously appealed to his reflec- 
tion. 



" Even they who worship other gods worship me, although 
they know it not." — Krishna. 



Taking a wide view of the matter under considera- 
tion, the mind reverts at once to that pristine epoch 
in the life of man, when phallicism held universal 
sway. We are to deal with mortal passion, in its 
lowest and highest forms, as conditioned by sexual 
impulse, and, if possible, determine the occult yet 
vital relation subsisting between the loftiest abstract 
conception of unsullied love and the purely physical, 
yet overmastering, desire whose carnal gratification 
allies us to the brute creation. 

It is therefore of signal moment that we recognize 
the initial stages of man's development when, as his- 
tory and archaeological research abundantly prove, 
the male and female genitalia were objects of devout 
worship. Already had the human intellect, in its 
first gropings after truth, recognized the immutable 
law of cause and effect. The crudest observation 
perceived the sun to be the generative principle of 
vegetable life. Far back in the earliest dawn of 
civilization, to which in vain we strive to assign even 
an approximate period, the ancient fire-worshippers 
bowed before the great life-giving principle embodied 
in sunlight. 



The silent, mysterious forces of nature resulting 
in the creation of a single plant filled the inchoate 
imagination with awe and reverence. Other natural 
phenomena inspired fear, and were to be propitiated, 
— here was a benignant yet all-potent manifestation 
of power, derived from an inscrutable source, but of 
so vast an import to man that his actual existence 
depended upon its operation. Small wonder that 
the earliest receptive faculty of the human mind ac- 
cepted the miracle with veneration. 

But there came to this primitive being, together 
with his undefined perception of primary causes op- 
erating in the material world, a consciousness of 
vivifying power in himself. He, too, through the 
subtle yet indubitable agency of the procreative in- 
stinct, was capable of producing life. What must 
have been the wondering delight imparted by that 
first thrilling revelation! Yet, subjective as was this 
earliest conception of truth, the human mind was 
still incapable of assimilating abstract ideas. Its 
concepts were related to the world only through ob- 
jective phenomena, the outward eye alone being per- 
ceptive. Man was indeed religious (relzgere), in that 
he recognized, however imperfectly, the existence of 
a power, external to his proper individuality, to 
which he was indissolubly bound — a cognition which 
in sun-worship had found its first exultant expression. 



Here, however, in himself, confined within the 
sphere of his physical activity, he became suddenly 
aware of a transcendent creative force, a purely sub- 
jective phenomenon, marvelous in its potency as it 
was mysterious in its nature, and of profoundest mo- 
ment to him, since through its agency he was imbued 
with power to propagate his species. To his primi- 
tive thought the phallus appeared henceforth as sa- 
credly related to the Giver of Life. 

In its peculiar function the Creator was supposed 
to symbolize his own omnipotence, and consequently 
the male organ of generation was deemed in the 
highest degree worthy of adoration. Incapable ol 
deeper cognition, man thus invested his procreative 
force with emblematic significance, seeking by the 
visible embodiment of the new truth, in symbols and 
images of various forms and characteristics, to exalt 
with due homage this tangible expression of Divine 
will. The phallus and the vulva were therefore ob- 
jects of special religious rites, the former representing 
directly the Creator's active power and the latter the 
passivity of Nature. 

Partaking, then, of an objective symbolism, rather 
than even a crude abstraction, we find that this once 
vital form of faith held sway over all known civiliza- 
tions, to many of which modern thought is com- 
pelled to pay high tribute in estimating the origin 



and progress of the world's enlightenment. Hindus, 
Chaldeans, Egyptians, Romans, Gauls, Teutons, Bri- 
tons, and Scandinavians alike shared in phallicism, 
and the earliest records of mankind prove indu- 
bitably that as a symbolic faith the worship of the 
reproductive organs existed as an ancient institution 
antedating the Christian era thousands of years. In- 
deed, the cult is of immemorial antiquity. The old- 
est Assyrian and Babylonian tablets amply attest the 
prevalence of this pristine worship, while the temples 
of Thebes and Karnak bear striking evidence of its 
impress upon the earliest forms of religious belief in 
Egypt. These, however, are but later transporta- 
tions of phallicism, derived from the still more ven- 
erable Hindu heritage, the oriental writings being 
imbued with the spirit and observance of the remotest 
phallic faith. 

It need not surprise us to find in the Old Testa- 
ment frequent and unquestionable references to this 
worship of the generative principle, which prevailed 
even over the denunciation of Judaism. Certain 
passages in the Pentateuch, and innumerable allusions 
elsewhere, leave no doubt of rites and ceremonies 
peculiar to phallicism, such as the practice of circum- 
cision and the manner of invoking divine approval 
in taking a solemn oath. 

It may well surprise us to know that Christianity 



has failed to obliterate the cult, and that throughout 
the Middle Ages it flourished, while as late as 1780 
definite traces of phallic observances were to be 
found in Northern Italy, and in the same century 
the lingering adoration of Priapus was discernible 
throughout Southern France. To-day the phallic 
symbol, lingam, is an object of veneration among 
millions of inhabitants of India; in Australasia, Poly- 
nesia, Melanesia, Abyssinia, Western Africa, and 
Madagascar, according to Westermarck, phallicism 
has existed from very ancient times, and among va- 
rious Indian tribes of South America, in Japan, and 
in Alaska and among the Pueblo Indians rites and 
ceremonies of evident phallic origin or relationship 
are still extant. 

A curious and somewhat startling reminiscence of 
phallicism is to be found in various symbols familiar 
to the Christian world, the significance of which is 
almost wholly ignored. Adequate and quite plau- 
sible researches have discovered, for instance, that 
the modern Maypole, typical of childhood's inno- 
cent merriment, is but a relic of phallic worship. 
So, too, the horse-shoe has been connected with the 
ancient emblems of the female genitalia, yoni, at no 
very distant date quite common in Great Britain and 
Ireland. The tender associations which surround 
the mistletoe are traced to Druidic and phallic cere- 



IO 

monies, and even the cross, sacred symbol of Chris- 
tian martyrdom, has been identified with the earliest 
records of phallic worship, an Assyrian relic in par- 
ticular bearing the clearest evidence that the cruci- 
form symbol typified the sacredness of love's physical 
expression. In like manner the obelisk, pillar, col- 
umn, altar, mount, and cave have been credibly 
derived from pristine phallic symbolism. 

It should be noted that these deductions are by no 
means fanciful, but the result of profound archaeolo- 
gical research, conducted by eminent and trust- 
worthy students and explorers. They prove conclu- 
sively the remarkable influence exerted by phallicism 
upon the more advanced, as well as the more primi- 
tive, races of men, and the fundamental power of 
that ancient faith which has enabled its symbolism, 
albeit greatly modified, to survive the most pro- 
nounced divergence in modern creeds which have 
long since discarded its observances. 

The Oriental and Egyptian theogonies have been 
either obliterated or substantially changed in the 
evolution of religious thought — phallicism alone re- 
tains its hold upon the human imagination, whether 
on the banks of the Ganges, in African jungles, or 
in remote Pacific isles. When we consider that con- 
cubinage, androgeny, and polygamy are far from 
being extinct even in this nineteenth century, the 



tenacity of phallic faith appears less remarkable. 

It is not within the scope of these casual reflec- 
tions to enter upon a detailed consideration of phal- 
lic worship. The theme has been considered in ex- 
tenso by Knight, Westermarck, Kraft-Ebing, Spitzka, 
Irwin and other noted authorities, whose works are 
of the deepest interest to the student of sexual psy- 
chology and evolution.* In this rapid survey our 
object has been simply to show that the human gen- 
italia, which to-day if spoken of or seen, even in 
effigy, bring to the cheek the blush of shame {puden- 
dum), were once universal objects of adoration and 
the symbols of the earliest religious intuition. Fur- 
thermore, had it been advisable, it might have 
been shown that procreation, so far from awaken- 
ing repugnance or conceived in a spirit of lust, was 
regarded with absolute reverence, forming the most 
sacred rite connected with the worship of the Creator 
— as is still to be witnessed among the millions of 
India. 

With the development of Christian thought and 
the growth of intellectual and spiritual abstraction, 
the ancient phallic faith has fallen away. Man has 
become self-conscious, and the simple-minded ven- 



*The interested reader is referred particularly to Mr. Clif- 
ford Howard's ' : Sex Worship " for an admirable treatment of 
the subject. 



eration which drew its inspiration from nature alone, 
has been supplanted by a system of theology wherein 
anthropomorphic ideas prevail. 

The problem presented to the seeker after psycho- 
logical truth is, whether the actual tenets of religious 
faith and the rigid scruples of modern ethics indicate 
an advance or a retrogression — whether, in a word, 
the Zend-Avesta and Walt Whitman are not nearer 
truth and nature than the Westminster catechism and 
Martin Farquhar Tupper. We have no evidence that 
the complacent philosopher Diogenes was of a libid- 
inous turn of mind ; yet he is said to have openly 
approved the phallic rite of sexual union performed 
in the market-place. Indeed, the study of phallicism 
affords overwhelming testimony that in the earlier 
stages of human development there existed a para- 
disal innocence, a chastity, not voluptuousness, of 
motive which to modern ideas is wholly inconceiv- 
able. 

"Men think they know," says Knight, "because 
they are sure they feel, and are firmly convinced be- 
cause strongly agitated. Hence proceed that haste 
and violence with which devout persons of all reli- 
gions condemn the rites and doctrines of others, and 
the furious zeal and bigotry with which they main- 
tain their own, while, perhaps, if both were equally 
understood, both would be found to have the same 



1 3 

meaning, and only to differ in the modes of convey- 
ing it" ("The Worship of Priapus"). That the 
worshippers of this procreative deity discriminated 
between pure religion and irreverent lust, is shown 
by the fact that under the Roman Empire severe re- 
strictions were imposed upon the phallic rites in- 
cluded in the Bacchanalian festivities, because of the 
licentiousness with which the temples were defiled. 



u 



4 'Passion is the sum-total of humanity. Without passion, 
religion, history, romance, art, would all be useless." — Balzac. 



In entering upon a consideration of Lust, Love, 
and Religion, with the special view of tracing their 
psychical correlation, it is proper to remark that ab- 
normal states of human passion — erotomania, saty- 
riasis, nymphomania, auto -erotism and the like — save 
as passing illustrations, are excluded. At the same 
time it may be noted that these aberrant manifesta- 
tions of the sexual instinct, to be regarded as patho- 
logical rather than psychical, are all-important in 
their positive assertion of the intimate bond between 
the procreative organs and the mind of man. A 
lacivious dream resulting in physical pleasure is a 
most convincing proof of this indissoluble relation- 
ship, not to speak of waking phenomena perhaps 
equally cogent in argument. 

Let us turn to the early period of life in which 
the psychological history of the individual may be 
said to reveal its primal significance. Dr. T. S. 
Clouston, in his invaluable "Clinical Lectures on 
Mental Diseases," says: "I should restrict puberty, 
as is now done when the term is used in a scientific 
and physiological sense, to the initial development 
of the function of reproduction, to its first appear- 



*5 

ance as an energy of the organism ; while I should 
define adolescence to denote the whole period of 
twelve years from the first evolution up to the full 
perfection of the reproductive energy. . . . The 
psychological change at puberty is no doubt great 
from childhood ; but it is inchoate and nascent ; it 
wants precision and conscious power ; its emotional- 
ism is spasmodic and childish ; its sentiment wants 
tenderness, and its ambitions and longings are allied 
to castle-building in the air." " At the latter period 
of adolescence in the male sex/' adds the author, 
" life first begins to look serious, both from the emo- 
tional side and in action. It is then only that child- 
ish things are put away. . . . There is a real sex- 
ual egoism, that most painful pleasure that consists 
of the half-conscious feeling that each person of one 
sex is an object of the most intense interest to each 
person of the opposite sex about the same age. . . . 
His emotional nature acquires for the first time a 
leaning towards the other sex that quite swallows up 
the former emotions. It is not yet at all under his 
control, fixed or definite in its aims. 

"But it is in the female sex that the period of 
adolescence has attracted most attention. Especially 
among those psychological students and delineators 
of character, the novelists of the day. As physicians, 
we know that it is only then that hysteria, migraine, 



i6 

and the graver functional and reflex neuroses arise. 
As men of the world, we know that the love-making, 
the flirting, the engagements to marry, and the bro- 
ken hearts of the adolescents are not really very se- 
rious affairs. The cataclysms of life do not happen 
then." 

The author here cites Gwendolen Harleth in 
1 i Daniel Deronda ' ' — characterizing the authoress as 
" by far the most acute and subtle psychologist of her 
time" — as a remarkably truthful instance of the spell 
exerted by sex influence, a power that draws the 
heroine to an utter stranger as unerringly as the load- 
stone attracts the needle, throughout the fine drama 
acting with the irresistible force of destiny. From a 
thoughtful analysis of Gwendolen's mental constitu- 
tion, the author draws the frank inference that " sex- 
ual intercourse should never be indulged in till after 
adolescence/ ' It seems to us, however, that there is 
another lesson to be derived from the restless passion 
of this beautiful girl in whom a higher feeling is 
manifest. 

The above quotations from a highly competent 
authority postulate clearly the state of mind in the 
young, resulting from physiological changes and con- 
sequent reflex thoughts and emotions, at a period 
when certain pre-determining causes and environ- 
ment incline the heart and intellect to love or lust. 



Few youths or maidens would confess even to them- 
selves that their emotional natures were stirred by 
aught but the chastest, most unselfish desire in these 
years of strong, though undefined, passion. Ribot 
(" Psychology of the Emotions'') , affirms that " like 
every other instinct, that of sex consists in a fixed 
relation between internal sensations coming from the 
genital organs, or tactile, visual or olfactory percep- 
tions on the one hand, and movements adapted to 
an end on the other. So far as it is an instinct, it 
is that and nothing but that. In the immense 
majority of animals, and frequently in men, it does 
not rise above this level ; in plainer words it is not 
accompanied by any tender emotion. The act once 
accomplished, there is separation and oblivion. . . 
Sexual love corresponds to a higher form of evolu- 
tion. Over and above instinct, it implies the addi- 
tion of a certain degree of tender feeling. It is not 
therefore a simple emotion, even in the tolerably nu- 
merous species of animals in which it can be studied. 
In man, more especially in civilized man, its com- 
plexity becomes extreme." In this connection we 
cannot forbear quoting Herbert Spencer's philosoph- 
ical analysis : 

" The passion which unites the sexes ... is 
habitually spoken of as though it were a simple feel- 
ing. Added to the purely physical elements of it 



iS 

are first to be noticed those highly complex impres- 
sions produced by personal beauty, around which are 
aggregated a variety of pleasurable ideas, not in 
themselves amatory, but which have an organized re- 
lation to the amatory feeling. With this there is 
united the complex sentiment which we term affec- 
tion — a sentiment which, as it can exist between 
those of the same sex, must be regarded an an inde- 
pendent sentiment, but one which is here greatly ex- 
alted. Then there is the sentiment of admiration, 
respect or reverence, in itself one of considerable 
power, and which in this relation becomes in a high 
degree active. 

" Then comes next the feeling called love of appro- 
bation. To be preferred before all the world, and 
that by one admired beyond all others, is to have 
the love of approbation gratified in a degree passing 
every previous experience, especially as there is that 
indirect gratification of it which results from the 
preference being witnessed by unconcerned persons. 
Further, the allied emotion of self-esteem comes into 
play. To have succeeded in gaining such attach- 
ment from, and sway over, another, is a proof of 
power which cannot fail agreeably to excite the 
amour propre. Yet again, the proprietary feeling 
has its share in the general activity; there is the 
pleasure of possession ; the two belong to each other. 



*9 

Once more, the relation allows of an extended liberty 
of action. Towards other persons a restrained 
behavior is requisite. Round each there is a subtle 
boundary that may not be crossed — an individuality 
on which none may trespass. But in this case the 
barriers are thrown down, and thus the love of unre- 
strained activity is gratified. 

" Finally, there is an exaltation of the sympathies. 
Egoistic pleasures of all kinds are doubled by an- 
other's sympathetic participation, and the pleasures 
of another are added to the egoistic pleasures. Thus, 
round the physical feeling forming the nucleus of the 
whole, are gathered the feelings produced by phys- 
ical beauty ; that constituting simple attachment, 
those of reverence, of love of approbation, of self- 
esteem, of property, of love of freedom, of sympathy. 
These, all greatly exalted, and severally tending to 
reflect their excitements on one another, unite to 
form the mental state we call love. And as each ot 
them is itself comprehensive of multitudinous states 
of consciousness, we may say that the passion fuses 
into one immense aggregate most of the elementary 
excitations of which we are capable ; and that hence 
results its irresistible power. 7 ' ("Principles of Psy- 
chology.") 

This judicial analysis, even dissection, of the hu- 
man emotions tending to create the "divine pas- 



20 



sion," besides being highly instructive, reveals the 
egoism, the fundamental selfishness of a sentiment 
generally supposed to partake of an objective, altru- 
istic nature. It may be questioned, however, whether 
in its highest, noblest form there does not enter into 
the relation, primarily subjective though it be, a gen- 
erous delight in the happiness of another, not to be 
obscured by the shadow of private personality. 

Of sexual passion in its entirety, dealing with the 
subject embryologically, Ribot asserts: "Finally, 
it has been said that the coupling of the two sexual 
elements is analogous to the coupling of the two ani- 
mals whence these elements are derived ; the sper- 
matozoid and the ovule do on a small scale what the 
two individuals do on a large one. The spermatic 
element, in directing itself towards the ovule which 
it is to fertilize, is animated by the same sexual in- 
stinct which guides the complete being towards the 
female of the same species." Delboeuf ("Revue 
Philosophique M ) states the case yet more graph- 
ically: "That girl," he says, "and that young 
man, in being attracted to one another, obey the 
will, unknown to both, of a spermatozoid, an ovule. 
But it may be taken as certain that this will is not 
unknown either to the spermatozoid or the ovule; 
both know what they want, and take it. To this 
end they give their orders to their respective brains 



through the medium of the heart, and the brain 
obeys without knowing why. Sometimes it imagines 
that it has been convinced by reason and explains its 
whole choice to itself. At bottom it has been but an 
unconscious instrument in the hands of an imper- 
ceptible workman who knew both what he wanted 
and what he was doing." 

In another passage in the work above cited, Ribot 
aptly observes that " sex instinct contents itself with 
a specific satisfaction (adducing in illustration the 
periodical desire of the lower animals); sexual love 
does not. ... In reality, the irresistible ele- 
ment is the sexual instinct, and only exists in virtue 
of it." And with still stronger emphasis he adds: 
" Sexual instinct remains the centre round which 
everything revolves ; nothing exists but through it. 
Character, imagination, vanity, imitation, fashion, 
time, place, and many other individual circumstances 
or social influences, give to love — as emotion or pas- 
sion — an unlimited plasticity. It is the task of the 
novelist to describe all its various shapes, and one 
which they have not failed to perform." 

We are considering the determining motive, the 
animus, which inspires the conscious ego in its initial 
response to amatory desire. The impulse, as we 
have seen, springs from a complexity of emotions 
well-nigh overmastering in their primary effect. 



22 
" Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?" 
exclaims Phebe in " As You Like It," and in Qui- 
tard's " Proverbes sur les Femmes" we find an ad- 
mirable portraiture of this coup de foudre. "The 
Latins, like the Greeks, declared that ' love is born 
at first sight.' It is difficult to explain why a glance 
should produce moral effects so swift, so unforeseen, 
so irresistible. It would seem that deep in the heart 
there must dwell some subtle, clairvoyant intuition 
regarding the object of affection, and that the first 
sight of the beloved one should be as an illuminating 
ray of light which, with the power of a magnetic 
force, draws us by indefinable affinities."* 

The raison d'etre of this mysterious attraction — 
which, by the way, has its antithesis in repulsion — 
is partly elucidated in Goethe's "Elective Affinities, ,, 
where the secret, yet indissoluble, bond between Ed- 
ward and Ottilie is subtly delineated. 

Whatever else inclines the human heart to love, it 
may be safely averred that physical charms play an 
important part in stimulating the sentiment of tender 



*" Les Latins disaient d' apres les Grecs : Ex aspectu nas- 
citur amor. On ne saurait bien expliquer comment un regard 
peut produire des effets moraux, si rapides, si imprevus, si 
irresistibles; mais il semble qu'il y ait au fond du coeur je ne 
sais quelle idee innee de l'objet qu'on doit aimer, et que le 
premier coup d'oeil qu'on lui donne soit comme un rayon de 
lumiere que le fait reconnaitre, et comme un courant magne- 
tique qui entraine vers lui par indefinissables affinites." 



2 3 



passion. "No man loves/' says Aristotle, "but he 
that was first delighted with comeliness and beauty.' 7 
" Omne pulchrum amabile," whatever is beautiful is 
lovable, declares Proclus, and even the more ethereal 
doctrines of Plato exalt "the Beautiful" in its influ- 
ence upon the emotion awakened by sexual attrac- 
tion. Yet every lover will confess that beauty is rel- 
ative, not absolute, the term being too elastic to ad- 
mit of narrow interpretation, and the world is full of 
happy unions which a superficial observer might con- 
sider mesalliances. 

Burton, in his "'Anatomy of Melancholy," cites 
Plotinus : " It is worth the labor to consider well of 
love, whether it be a god or a devil, or passion of the 
mind, or partly god, partly devil, partly passion." 
Another ancient author calls it " the primum mobile 
of all the affections;" while Plato declares it to be 
" the great devil, for its vehemency and sovereignty 
over all other passions — boni pulchrique fruendi de- 
siderium." Socrates affirms that love is the mean be- 
tween the good and the evil, between the base and 
the lovely, between the mortal and immortal,* while 
his illustrious pupil draws a philosophic distinction 
between the spiritual, the human, and the carnal 
passions: "These three loves are classed as the 



* Inter bonum et malum, inter turpe et pulchrum, inter 
mortale et aeternum. (Niphus Liber de Amore, Leyden, 1641.) 



^4 

divine, of the contemplative ; the human, of the ac- 
tive; and the animal, of the voluptuous man,"* or 
as it is elsewhere expressed : Amor itaque omnis in- 
cipit ab aspectu, sed contemplativi hominis amor ab 
aspectu ascendit in mentem. Voluptuosi descendit 
in tactum." Finally, Lucian thus contrasts the car- 
nal and the spiritual passions : " One love was born 
in the sea, which is as various and raging in young 
men's breasts as the sea itself, and causeth burning 
lust : the other is that golden chain which was let 
down from heaven, and with a divine fury ravisheth 
our souls, made to the image of God, and stirs us up 
to comprehend the innate and incorruptible beauty 
to which we were once created." Again he says, 
" Let me beware lest I confound filthy, burning lust 
with pure and divine love." 

However the emotion may evade analysis, of the 
power — Plato's "sovereignty" — of Love there can 
be no question. Well sings the Mantuan bard : 
44 Omnia vincit amor nos et cedamus Amori." 

For it have men forsworn honor, virtue, crown, 
and princely dignity — all that can ennoble life or 
lend lustre to exalted station. Hieronymus pun- 
gently observes : "Si mulier potuit vincere eum qui 

*Tres isti amores tria nomina sortiuntur; Contemplativi 
hominis amor divinus, Activi humanus, Voluptuosi ferinus 
cognominatur. (Niphus, loc. cit.) 






jam erat in paradiso, non est mirum si eos impediat 
qui nondum ad paradisum pervenerunt." 
What did Marc Antony, 

" The triple pillar of the world transform'd 
Into a strumpet's fool," 

not sacrifice to gratify his illicit passion ! 

"Cleo. — If it be love indeed, tell me how much. 
Ant. — There's beggary in the love that can be reckoned. 
Cleo. — I'll set a bourne how far to be beloved. 
Ant. — Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth. 
* # * * 

Ant. — Let Rome in Tiber melt ! and the wide arch 

Of the ranged empire fall ! Here is my space. 
Kingdoms are clay; our dungy earth alike 
Feeds beast as man; the nobleness of life 
Is to do thus : when such a mortal pair 

\Embracing\ 
And such a twain can do't. 

% * « * 

Now for the love of Love and her soft hours." 

It is but an illustrious instance of the lapses from 
marital constancy which have been a ' i A Blot on the 
'Scutcheon" in many a regal history, and in the 
world -at -large have tainted, as with a foul miasma, 
the purest and sweetest of household atmospheres. 
We need not multiply examples, which, to a careful 
observer of events, will readily suggest themselves. 
Gladly would society claim the immunity or extenu- 
ation due to temporary aberration of intellect : the 



26 

facts leave no question of the fullest moral respon- 
sibility. If civilization and refinement mean any- 
thing in this nineteenth century, then must we regard 
dereliction from conjugal fidelity a flagrant reversion 
to barbarism. 

Origen is said to have had recourse to self-mutila- 
tion rather than endure the pitiless conflict with 
sexual desire, and we know from history how saints 
and sinners have alike yielded to the tyrannizing 
thraldom of all-consuming passion. Nor would men 
abnegate the felicities of love for all their trials — as 
Propertius expresses it : 

Cl Medicine cures all human ills. 
Only the lover resents the cure."* 

Or, as Emerson quotes, speaking of the higher spir- 
itual love: "All other pleasures are not worth its 
pains,' ' and, as Publius Syrus observes: " Love is 
like a torch, the more it is agitated the brighter it 
burns." t 

Assuming, though, that, whatever be its primary 
source, there is a purer, more exalted, as well as a 
more sensual, phase of human passion in its relations 
to sex, how shall we discriminate? "There may 
be passion without love," says Marion Crawford; 

* ' 4 Omnes humanos sanit medicina dolores 
Solus amor morbi non amat artificem." 

f " Amans ita ut fax, agitando ardescit majis." 



27 

" there can be no love without passion.'' Queenly 
Dido herself was distracted with grief in her futile 
ardor to possess the heart of Aeneas. Michelet, in 
his thoughtful work "L' Amour/' while clinging to 
earth — was he not a Frenchman, forsooth? — delin- 
eates here and there the more ennobling transports 
of his theme. Xavier de Maistre, in " Voyage autour 
de ma Chambre," touches lightly, but profoundly, 
upon the subject in saying of the bed, ^C est la 
trone de V Amour." A distinguished writer, com- 
pared purity to an onion, delicately portraying 
the danger of love's dalliance. We strip off husk 
after husk, then layer after layer, thinking to 
reach finally the real substance, until, behold ! the 
substance is gone. The sublety of the metaphor is 
characteristic of Hawthorne's psychological insight. 
The dividing line between chaste affection and animal 
lust seems to be clearly drawn ; yet so intimately 
associated are the purest and the most polluted emo- 
tions of the human mind, that the keenest observer 
is often baffled, and the demarkation — readily modified 
by heredity, temperament, and occasion — becomes 
well-nigh evanescent. 

Exquisitely pure, exquisitely impure — such would 
be the characterization of many a man and woman 
could we but draw aside the veil that mercifully con- 
ceals from the world the thoughts and desires familiar 



28 

to private consciousness — angel and demon clasped 
in bitter and tireless conflict. This is the tragedy 
of life, surpassing in its intensity and pathos the 
sternest drama ever enacted, and beyond the gift of 
genius to portray. Let us look frankly, yet pity- 
ingly, at a few melancholy facts. 

In an article in the "Alienist and Neurologist/ ' 
on "Auto-Erotism," by Dr. Havelock Ellis, of Lon- 
don, a significant case is cited. The writer says : 
"A married lady who is a leader in social purity 
movements, and an enthusiast for sexual chastity, 
discovered, through reading some pamphlet against 
solitary vice, that she had herself been guilty of prac- 
ticing one of its forms for years without knowing it. 
The profound anguish and hopeless despair of this 
woman in face of what she believed to be the moral 
ruin of her whole life cannot well be described.' ' 

In < < Transactions of the American Association of 
Obstetrics," Vol. V., 1892, a contributor affirms 
that one of his patients, a devout church member, 
had never allowed herself to entertain sexual thoughts 
referring to men, but the sight of even trivial objects 
suggestive of animal passion frequently awakened in 
her mind erotic desires. 

These cases certainly present a curious psycho- 
logical study, being an eloquent commentary upon 
what Kaar expressively terms ' ' Psycopathia Sex- 



29 

ualis." Dr. Ellis further quotes Madame Roland, 
who in " Memoires Particulieres ' ' presents a vivid 
picture of the anguish produced on an innocent 
girl's mind by the doctrine of the sinfulness of erotic 
dreams. As an example of the power of libidinous 
thought, though not of specifically auto-erotic man- 
ifestations, the author cites the case of a somewhat 
eccentric preacher, fifty-seven years of age, who ex- 
perienced the liveliest sensations of erotic pleasure 
in the presence of certain ladies. 

The above instances illustrate the absolute des- 
potism of the sexual instinct, even admitting a purely 
reflex action in the genital excitement. They as- 
sert, moreover, the perfect compatability of ardent 
religious emotion and a virtuous life with practical 
sensuality, reacting upon the moral nature with ter- 
rible force. The psycho-physiological problem in- 
volved is to determine how far the erotic phenomena 
are related to conscious or unrecognized thoughts of 
a lascivious character — whether the insidious canker 
of lust had not quietly been consuming the flower of 
chastity, and the mind become imperceptibly es- 
tranged from its natural operations. 

Still more phenomenal is the fact that women 
have been known to be sexually excited in listening 
to music, or in viewing pictures, even of chaste de- 
sign (Schrenck-Notzing), such women knowing 



3° 

nothing of sexual relationship. An instance is cited 
of similar emotions being awakened upon sight of 
the sea, and other indications of hyperaesthesia are 
adduced, showing unmistakably a bewildering con- 
fusion of sexual and moral or aesthetic ideas. The 
importance of day-dreams has been noted in mould- 
ing the tone of thought, Hamlin Garland's " Rose 
of Dutcher Coolly" being quoted as representing the 
effect of a circus-rider upon the visionary medita- 
tions of " a healthy, normal girl at adolescence." 
Raffalovich alludes to the influence of solitary rev- 
eries upon the minds of persons of the same sex — 
" psychic onanism;" while it has been observed that 
amorous, even erotic, visions are frequently cherished 
by refined and imaginative young men and women 
whose outward lives are chastity itself, and who 
would instinctively abjure all contamination with 
lasciviousness or pruriency. 

How, then, establish with any approach to cer- 
tainty the confines of lust, love, and religion — emo- 
tions so interfused, so mutually dependent, that we 
cannot ignore their logical association? In one of 
the finest dramas in the Castilian tongue, f Don 
Juan Tenorio," of Ruiz Zorilla, the co-existence of 
lust and love in the mind of the hero is admirably 
depicted. So far as baser passion is concerned, the 
tragedy recalls at once the " Don Juan" of Byron 



3' 

and Mozart's " Don Giovanni." Yet Zorilla's pro- 
tagonist is at last touched to finer feeling, and in the 
presence of his inamorata the peccadillos of past 
years are shriven by the benignant influence of a 
transparently pure affection. Few scenes in dramatic 
art can equal the hero's declaration of love in the 
beautiful quinta whither the abducted heroine has 
been conveyed. Disdaining to take advantage of 
the situation, he pours forth his soul- felt, exquisite 
passion in words aglow with chaste inspiration, and 
of so moving an eloquence that it were beyond mor- 
tal woman to withhold the ecstatic surrender : " Love 
me, Don Juan, or tear my heart from my bosom, for 
I adore thee."* 

Alas, the course of true love ran too smoothly to 
satisfy either fate or the exigencies of Spanish tragedy. 
The irate father and other nobles, to whom Don 
Juan's previous career is well known, enter with 
drawn swords; the hero stands at bay, and waving 
his rapier aloft cries in wild despair : 

" I called to heaven, yet it heard not my cry; 

Closed on me are its portals — 

For my steps, then, among mortals 
Shall heaven be held to answer, and not Iff 

* " Amame 6 arrancame el corazon, 

Porque te adoro ! " 
f " Llame al cielo y no me oyo, 
Sus puertas me cierra — 
Pues de mis pasos en la tierra 
Responda el cielo, y no yo." 



3 2 

Whereupon the unhappy lover proceeds to perforate 
as many of the enemy as possible before yielding to 
their combined assault. 

The close of " Daisy Miller," by Henry James, 
Jr., contains an instructive lesson in regard to the 
danger of prejudging the motive of social relations 
between the sexes, and cruelly ascribing lust to a 
perfectly wholesome, natural intercourse. It will be 
remembered that Daisy typifies a bright, lovely 
young American girl, who, secure in the conscious- 
ness of her unsullied character, is wont to set at defi- 
ance the conventionalities of life. Journeying to 
Rome, she accidentally forms the acquaintance of an 
Italian count, Giovanelli, to whom she is beholden 
for certain acts of courtesy, accepted with the frank 
naiveti of guileless confidence. The American col- 
ony, however, well knows that her cavaliere servente 
is a route and points at the young woman the finger 
of virtuous scorn, considering itself scandalized. 
The suspicious attitude of her persecutors rouses in 
Daisy's mind a righteous indignation, and, in appar- 
ent obduracy, she accepts still further favors from 
her admirer, even visiting the Colosseum by moon- 
light with him alone. This last performance is re- 
garded by her countrywomen as an unblushing esca- 
pade, and when, as a result of her imprudence, the 
girl is stricken with malarial fever and dies, there is 



33 

more criticism than pity bestowed upon her conduct. 
The scene beside the poor child's grave is a fine 
touch of dramatic pathos, the supposed cause of her 
misery being present as an unwelcome spectator. 

" Giovanelli was very pale; on this occasion he 
wore no flower in his button-hole — he seemed to 
wish to say something. At last he said : ' She was 
the most beautiful lady I ever saw, and the most 
amiable ;' and then he added in a moment, ' and she 
was the most innocent.' 

" Winterbourne looked at him, and presently re- 
peated his words, * and the most innocent ?' 

" The most innocent !' " 

Was ever sweeter compliment paid to American 
womanhood ? Yet it is dismally true that Mr. James' 
characterization of Daisy Miller brought upon him 
many a gentle anathema from self-righteous philistin- 
ism. The story recalls the remark of Charlotte 
Bronte, in "Vilette," to the effect that, through a 
certain perversity of the mind, we sometimes take 
positive delight in shocking the sensibilities of those 
by whom we cannot in any case expect to be justly 
appreciated. 

What shall we think of Becky Sharp ? Thackeray, 
with a delicacy of feeling that marked true gentility 
of nature, withholds judgment, leaving his heroine 
still undefined, like a suspended chord in music : 



34 

4i There she is, gentlemen: make what you will of 
her." 

Charles Kingsley, having been appointed lecturer 
on history in the University of Oxford, with the 
rarest modesty resigned his chair on the ground of 
incompetency to fill the position with the entire ap- 
proval of his conscience. Not long after, meeting 
Froude, the scholars compared notes, agreeing that 
we cannot rightly ascertain the weight of historical 
fact — or as Kingsley instanced: a We can never 
know whether Mary, Queen of Scots, was virtuous or 
vicious."* 

In pursuing this thread of inquiry it has been our 
object to emphasize the responsibility resting upon 
those who claim an intuitive perception of character, 
assured that they can determine readily the com- 
plexion of human passions widely diverse in their 
operations and results, yet intimately conjoined 
through derivation from a common source — as the 
same spring may send forth limpid or unclean waters, 
according to the nature of the soil they permeate. 
The beautiful couplet of Gray : 

1 ' O'er her warm cheek and rising- bosom move 
The bloom of young Desire and purple light of Love," 

may be considered chaste or erotic as the thought is 

interpreted by a pure or tainted imagination. The 

*cf. Pope's "Essay on Man," v. 231. 



35 

form is Swinburnian, yet there is nothing whatever 
in common between the inspired author of the im- 
mortal " Elegy " and the very earthy writer of " Laus 
Veneris. ' ' 

Let us for a moment breathe the air of heaven, 
which, like a benediction, rests upon Milton's muse. 
This from "Comus"; 

Lady, — " O, welcome pure-eyed faith, white-handed hope, 
Thou hovering angel, girt with golden wings, 
And thou unblemish'd form of chastity!" 



First Br. — " So dear to heaven is saintly chastity, 
That, when a soul is found sincerely so, 
A thousand liveried angels lacquey her, 
Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt; 
And, in clear dream and solemn vision, 
Tell her of things that no gross ear can hear; 
Till oft converse with heavenly habitants 
Begin to cast a beam on the outward shape, 
The unpolluted temple of the mind, 
And turns it, by degrees, to the soul's essence, 
Till all be made immortal: but when lust, 
By unchaste looks, loose gestures, and foul talk, 
But most by lewd and lavish act of sin, 
Lets in defilement to the inward parts, 
The soul grows clotted by contagion, 
Imbodies, and imbrutes, till she quite lose 
The divine property of her first being. 
Such are those thick and gloomy shadows damp, 
Oft seen in charnel vaults and sepulchres, 
Lingering and sitting by a new-made grave, 
As loth to leave the body that it loved, 



36 

And link'd itself, by carnal sensuality, 
To a degenerate and degraded state." 
* * * * 
Lady. — — " To him that dares 

Arm his profane tongue with contemptuous words 

Against the sun-clad power of chastity, 

Fain would I something say; — yet to what end? 

Thou hast nor ear, nor soul, to apprehend 

The sublime notion, and high mystery, 

That must be uttered to unfold the sage 

And serious doctrine of virginity; 

And thou art worthy that thou should'st not know 

More happiness than this thy present lot." 

Yet although imbued with ideal beauty, she who 
is "chaste as morning dew" is fated to experience 
at times the throes of human passion. Beneath her 
placid thoughts and vestal innocence there steals 
upon the heart of every true woman an undertone of 
restless, indefinable longing not to be dispelled by 
the pleasing accidents of social amenities, the glow 
of intellectual pursuits, the delight in aesthetic taste 
and loveliness, or saintly consecration of life to the 
happiness of others. 

At the close of adolescence, although not so com- 
pletely developed, the youth is fully conscious of 
sexual desire, if he has not learned to sin. With the 
more innocent maiden, however, there is a com- 
pensating realization of her natural mission derived 
from physiological phenomena wholly alienate from 
masculine experience. The new truth comes to her 



37 

at puberty. She observes with tremulous awe the 
access of the catamenia and their periodical recur- 
rence ; she notes with wondering pride the fair 
development of the mammae, and the soft comeli- 
ness of feminine contours hitherto undreamed. 
But why this marvelous change? Only the in- 
stinct of maternity can solve the mystery. Long 
since, in the infant household of dollhood, had she 
unconsciously disclosed the innate purpose of her 
existence in the world of humanity. Now, the living 
reality dawns upon her half shrinking, half rapturous 
imagination. As yet she dimly discerns the tremen- 
dous significance of the revelation, but with growing 
intelligence the word " mother' ' acquires new ten- 
derness and sanctity. 

Coequal with physical evolution there is a cor- 
responding psychical development. The moral na- 
ture assumes a deeper and more serious tone; the 
mental faculties are stimulated, and the emotions 
rendered more receptive and acute. The nascent 
woman (to whom the soul of manly chivalry should 
pay the tribute of breathless homage) becomes more 
reticent and sensitive. As a frightened wood-bird 
seeks the recesses of the forest, she withdraws into 
the chapel of her virgin meditations, while dreams of 
poetic happiness, or vague, melancholy questionings 
throng upon her fancy. 



38 

Can there be any doubt as to the determining 
cause of this impressive transformation? Is there, 
save in sexual influences, any explanation of so mo- 
mentous a departure from simple girlhood? Yet 
precisely at the moment when she requires the most 
vigilant protection, this sacred and commanding 
object of mankind's noblest solicitude is exposed 
to the greatest danger. The conventionalities of 
society, the yearning assiduity of parental care, 
and the ethical influences of religious faith are 
alike powerless to control the inherent force 
of sexual passion. The victim of man's concu- 
piscence, through a finer, more delicate organization, 
may possess compunctions of conscience — the profes- 
sional seducer has absolutely none. Under the spell 
of irresistible desire, enhanced by the persuasive 
sophistries of her pseudo-lover, the child — for child 
she is at heart — is ushered into the labyrinthine, yet 
entrancing, mysteries of passionate abandon. Even 
while secure in maidenly innocence there lurked 
within the shadows of her being the fell tempter Oc- 
casion. " Laudem virtutis necessitati damus," says 
Quintilian : only the merest accident, born of in- 
scrutable fate, sufficed to achieve her moral ruin. 
The unconscionable Gaul, with characteristic cyn- 
icism, states the case in the pitiless terms of a profes- 
sional rake. 



39 

But there is an obverse as well as a reverse to the 
shield. We have cited only the situation in which 
obvious lust is the ruling impulse of sexual grati- 
fication, especially in the man, though it were an 
egregious error to suppose the woman blameless, she 
being clearly particeps criminis and in equity fully 
culpable. There are violations of rigid virtue in history 
and literature, wherein the moral lapse appeals to the 
sympathetic imagination so strongly, and is so soft- 
ened by romantic affection, as to wear the color of 
innocence rather than of conscious guilt. The story 
of Francesca da Rimini and her lover, Paolo — whom 
the great Dante apotheosized in the " Inferno " and 
Silvio Pellico honored with dramatic genius, and 
whose pathetic fate has struck a responsive chord in 
the hearts of poets and painters of a later day, illus- 
trates, we had almost said, the chastity of sexual 
desire. Compassionate her, mortal man and woman! 
— this beautiful girl, doomed to an alliance with one 
whose character and physical deformity filled her 
with abhorrence, for which there was no solace save 
in the ardent love of the younger brother, Paolo, to 
whom she had confided the tenderest passion of her 
soul. That they should have been discovered and 
yielded their blissful young lives to appease the wrath 
of Giovanni seems the natural atonement for a love 
like theirs. 



4Q 

Dante. — Quanti dolce pensier, quanto disio 
Mend costoro al doloroso passo! 

— i tuoi martiri 
A lagrimar mi fanno triste e pio. 

Francesca. — — Nessun maggior dolore, 

Che ricordarsi del tempo felice 
Nella miseria; 



Noi leggevamo un giorno per diletto 
Di Lancillotto, come amor lo strinse. 
Soli eravamo e senz' alcun sospetto, 

Per piu fiate gli occhi ci sospinse 
Quella lettura, e scolorocci il viso: 
Ma solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse. 

Quando leggemmo il disiato riso 
Esser baciato da cotanto amante, 
Questi, che mai da me non fia diviso, 

La bocca mi bacio tutto tremante: 

# * -x- -x- 

Quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante. 

Dante, — Mentre che l'uno spirto questo disse, 
L'altro piangeva si, che di pietade 
I'venni men cosi com' io morisse; 

E caddi come corpo morto cade. 

The entire passage is thus rendered by Leigh 
Hunt: 

Francesca, — " ' Love that soon kindleth in a gentle heart, 
Seized him thou look'st on for the form and face, 
Whose end still haunts me like a rankling dart. 



4i 

Love, which by love will be denied no grace, 
Gave me a transport in my turn so true, 
That lo! 'tis with me even in this place. 

Love brought us to one grave. The hand that slew 
Is doomed to mourn us in the pit of Cain.' 
Such were the words that told me of those two. 

Downcast I stood, looking so full of pain 
To think how hard and sad a case it was, 
That my guide asked what held me in that vein. 

His voice aroused me; and I said, ' Alas! 
All their sweet thoughts, then, all the steps that led 
To love, but brought them to this dolorous pass' — 

Then turning my sad eyes to theirs I said, 
Dante. ' Francesca, see —these human cheeks are wet — 
Truer and sadder tears were never shed. 

But tell me. At the time when sighs were sweet, 
What made thee strive no longer ?— hurried thee 
To the last step where bliss and sorrow meet?' 

Francesca. — ' There is no greater sorrow,' answered she, 
' And this thy teacher here knoweth full well, 
Than calling to mind joy in misery.* 

But since thy wish be great to hear us tell 
How we lost all but love, tell it I will 
As well as tears will let me it befell. 

One day we read how Lancelot gazed his fill 
At her he loved, and what his lady said. 
We were alone, thinking of nothing ill. 



* — " This is truth the poet sings, 
That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier 
things." — " Locksley Hall,' 



42 

Oft were our eyes suspended as we read, 
And in our cheeks the color went and came; 
Yet one sole passage struck resistance dead. 

'Twas where the lover, moth-like in his flame, 
Drawn by her sweet smile, kissed it. O! then he 
Whose lot and mine are now for aye the same, 

All in a tremble on the mouth kissed me. 
The book did all. Our hearts within us burn'd 
Through that alone. That day no more read we.' 

While thus one spake, the other spirit mourn'd 
With wail so woful, that at his remorse 
I felt as though I should have died — I turned 

Stone-stiff; and to the ground fell like a corse.' " 

Thus closes the Fifth Canto of Dante's "Inferno " 
— as moving a picture of human misery and Christian 
compassion as literature contains. It was fitting 
that the author of " Gli mie Prigione " and Leigh 
Hunt (" The Story of Rimini/') were touched to feel- 
ing utterance by this fourteenth century tragedy, 
and that the art of Ary Scheffer, Cabanel, and George 
Frederic Watts should have been inspired by imag- 
inative portraiture of the hapless lovers. 

In Goethe's il Faust" — that masterly microcosm 
of mortal existence, as influenced by the subtlest 
phases of passion — we have a profoundly interesting 
delineation of earthly love awakened by sexual in- 
stinct. It must be borne in mind, however, that the 
poet's hero is by no means actuated by sensual mo- 



43 

tives alone, being of refined and scholarly tastes far 
removed from grosser sensual desire. As the drama 
develops, lustful temptation, typified in Mephistoph- 
eles, gains irresistible ascendancy over Faust's finer 
nature. Yet his early question regarding Margaret's 
age, and the caustic reply of his evil genius : " Why, 
you talk like a Frenchman/ ' indicate clearly enough 
the presence of an underlying animal motive, of 
which the lover is at first insensible. With consum- 
mate art he is wooed from the first tender imaginings 
of an aspiring soul, animated by a lofty aim and 
generous impulse, to the more ardent visions of sexual 
conquest — from the musings in Margaret's bed- 
chamber : 

— " Here lay the child when life's fresh heavings 
Its tender bosom first made warm, 
And here with pure, mysterious weavings 
Enwrought itself the god-like form," 

to the maturer purpose of his sensual zeal. 

And now contrast with the restless longings and 
fervid desire of Faust the ineffably sweet emotions of 
Margaret, warmed by the most exquisite affection, 
mantled by virgin innocence, and suffusing every 
maidenly fancy with the grace and beauty of '< love's 
young dream. ' ' Whatever carnal motive may have 
actuated her lover, the mind and heart of Margaret 
are unsullied by touch of impurity. Even when fate 



44 

has visited upon her the bitterest consequences of 
her innocent surrender, her imagination is still un- 
tainted by consciousness of guilt. " It was so 
sweet !"* she exclaims, as from the depths of her 
young spirit's inscrutable agony wells the memory 
of purest love. There is nothing of the Magdalen's 
remorse, nothing which to her limpid thoughts sug- 
gests pollution — only the impassioned, rather than 
passionate, sense of a shattered dream and the awful 
shadow of a pitiless retribution. Surely no more 
heart-breaking sorrow could attend the gentlest as- 
pirations of a human soul. 

Far otherwise is it with him whose earthier motives 
have obscured the radiance of his original impulse. 
The struggle has been deep within him. There were 
moods of exaltation when immortal Love possessed 
his glowing fancy, and his heart was stirred by loftier 
purpose, as when he is touched to pensive longings : 

11 1 leave behind me field and meadow, 

Veiled in the dusk of holy night 
Whose ominous and awful shadow 

Awakes the better soul to light. 
To sleep are lulled life's wild desires, 

The hand of passion lies at rest, 
The love of God the bosom fires, 

The love of man stirs up the breast. 



* Es war so suss. 



45 

"When in my study-chamber nightly 

The friendly lamp begins to burn, 
Then in the bosom thought beams brightly, 

Homeward the heart will then return. 
Reason once more bids passion ponder, 

Hope blooms again and smiles on man: 
Back to youth's rills he yearns to wander — 

Ah, to the source where life began." 

And in the exalted scene in the forest and the 
Invocation, 

" Spirit sublime, thou gav'st me all I asked" — 

and the sudden revulsion of feeling in which Faust's 
loathing of Mephistopheles is expressed, 

" — and then 
Thou gav'st me this companion" — 

are eloquently portrayed the phases of a spiritual 
conflict as mysterious in its origin and portent as it 
is inexorable. As the drama proceeds, the subtlety 
of psychological affinity between natural sexual de- 
sire of possession and monstrous indifference to 
moral lapse for which there is no expiation, is thrill- 
ingly depicted. Taken in its entirety, this most 
powerful drama of modern times may be said to 
typify the strength, the passion, and the tenderness 
of the sexual instinct — the intensity of longing, how- 
ever undefinable, the pathos, and the mastery by 
which man and woman are mutually controlled, 



46 

together with the irrefragible ties by which purity 
and sensuality, love and desire, are forever bound. 

" Men that do noble things all purchase glory, 
One man for one brave act hath proved a story; 
But if that one ten thousand dames o'ercame, 
Who would record it, if not to his shame? 
'Tis far more conquest with one to live true 
Than every hour to triumph over new." 

— Thomas Campion, Circa 1617. 

Few records of passion derived from sexual pre- 
science have awakened so profound a human interest 
as the love history of Abelard and Heloise — the one 
a saint, founder of the famous Paraclete, and the 
keenest thinker, as well as ablest theologian of the 
twelfth century, the other, his pupil, a nun whose 
goodness, beauty, and refinement of feeling compel 
reverent interest. The love-songs of Heloise, replete 
with the tenderest devotion, and the clandestine cor- 
respondence of the ill-fated pair, exhale the divinest 
essence of human affection, blended with the purest, 
loftiest aspirations that can sway the soul. Even 
after the fearful fate which befell Abelard — unspeak- 
able mutilation at the hands of his enemies — the 
heroic love of Heloise shines forth as perhaps the 
most illustrious instance of woman's unwearying 
constancy. This assuredly was love, not lust, in- 
dicating rather a psychical divergence than correla- 
tion, since only the memory of the highest sexual 



47 

bliss remained to them. The tragedy derives special 
importance as indicating the mediation of the reli- 
gious sentiment in moulding the sexual impulse. 

Probably no writer of the romantic school of the 
last century attained greater celebrity than Jean 
Jacques Rousseau. The eccentricities of his mind 
and the open immorality of his life are to be de- 
plored; yet the surpassing brilliancy of his style, his 
affluence of sentimental enthusiasm, and the poetic 
loveliness with which he invested nature, claim for 
him an undying place in literature. It is impossible 
to peruse the fervid pages of " La Nouvelle Heloise" 
without a sense of over-mastering genius, and 
throughout his works one may find here and there 
transcendently sweet and inspired thoughts. Yet 
this rare intellectual quality and delicacy of imag- 
inative insight were allied to the grossest sensuality, 
his own " Confessions " unblushingly declaring that 
he could scarcely mingle in the society of women 
without sensations of the most lascivious erotism — 
after which the scathing commentary of Sir Joseph 
Acton, in his exhaustive work upon " The Repro- 
ductive Organs," seems amply merited. 

It is difficult to deal with Byron. The writer re- 
calls the case of a young woman, whose life and con- 
versation precluded all suspicion of aught but the 
most maidenly chastity, whom he surprised one day 



48 

convulsed with innocent (?) laughter over the droll- 
eries of " Don Juan." Truly none but a dullard 
can fail to be enlivened by the inimitable wit and 
grace of innuendo, as well as magical charm of lyric 
beauty, which characterize what the critic Taine 
claimed to be the finest production of Byron's muse. 
It should be remembered that the poet's loftiness of 
pride and consciousness of intellectual supremacy 
rendered him wholly indifferent to the impressions 
which his conduct, naturally enough, left upon 
others. It is highly improbable that his life was that 
of the libertine assumed by his detractors — any more 
than that Charles Lamb is to be credited with the 
excesses implied in "Confessions of a Drunkard.' ' 
There is a brave defiance in certain mental atti- 
tudes which foils us in our analysis of character, and 
if any thoughtful observer can believe in the deprav- 
ity of the essayist who spent the larger portion of his 
days in rigid service in the august East India House, 
or in the chronic debaucheries of the poet who, 
between "Hours of Idleness," 1807, and his latest 
verses just previous to his death, 1824 : in that brief 
period of creative power produced all those mar- 
velous compositions — if any can believe in these 
delinquencies of genius, we cannot follow him. Cer- 
tainly, immoral though Byron may have been, the 
author of the third canto of " Childe Harold" 



49 

sinned like a god, and silences irreverent aspersion. 
But there are passages throughout his works, and the 
entire lyric " Maid of Athens," which reveal a celes- 
tial rather than a demoniacal inspiration. 

Let us examine for a moment this perplexing 
phase of the poet's thought. In " Laus Veneris" 
Swinburne is seductively erotic. There is a vein of 
youthful corruption in these apparently conscious 
offenses against love and purity, a willful and perverse 
animalism which even the divine afflatus of Poesy 
cannot wholly purge, nor the semblance of ennobling 
passion transfigure. In the incomparably beautiful 
chorus in " Atalanta in Calydon," the Hymn to 
Venus, the poet soars into the empyrean upon the 
wings of sweetest song. 

" We have seen thee, O Love, thou art fair; thou art goodly, 

O Love; 
Thy wings make light in the air as the wings of a dove. 
Thy feet are as winds that divide the stream of the sea; 
Earth is thy covering to hide thee, the garment of thee. 
Thou art swift and subtle and blind as a flame of fire; 
Before thee the laughter, behind thee the tears of desire; 
And twain go forth. beside thee, a man and a maid; 
Her eyes are the eyes of a bride whom delight makes afraid; 
As the breath in the buds that stir is her bridal breath: 
But Fate is the name of her; and his name is Death. 

1 ' For an evil blossom was borri 

Of sea-foam and the frothing of blood, 
Blood-red and bitter of fruit, 

And the seed of it laughter and tears. 



5° 

And the leaves of it madness and scorn; 
A bitter flower from the bud, 
Sprung of the sea without root, 

Sprung without graft from the years. 

" The weft of the world was untorn 

That is woven of the day or the night, 

The hair of the hours was not white 
Nor the raiment of time overworn, 

When a wonder, a world's delight, 
A perilous goddess was born; 

And the waves of the sea as she came 
Clove, and the foam at her feet, 

Fawning, rejoiced to bring forth 
A fleshly blossom, a flame 
Filling the heavens with heat 

To the cold white ends of the north * 

STROPHE. 

Chorus. — " O Love, our conqueror, matchless in might, 
Thou prevailest, O Love, thou dividest the prey; 

In damask cheeks of a maiden 

Thy watch through the night is set. 

Thou roamest on the sea; 
On the hills, in the shepherds' huts thou art; 
Nor of deathless gods, nor of short-lived men, 

From thy madness any escapeth. 

ANTISTROPHE. 

Unjust, through thee, are the thoughts of the just; 
Thou dost bend them, O Love, to thy will, to thy spite. 

Unkindly strife thou hast kindled, 

This wrangling of son with sire, 
For great laws, throned in the heart, 
To the sway of a rival power give place, 

To the love-light flashed from a fair bride's eyes." 

— Whitelaw, trans. 



' r cf. The Antigone of Sophocles: 



5i 

And in air the clamorous birds, 

And men upon earth that hear 
Sweet articulate words 
Sweetly divided apart, 

And in shallow and channel and mere 
The rapid and footless herds, 

Rejoiced, being foolish at heart. 
For all they said upon Earth, 

She is fair, she is white like a dove, 
And the life of the world in her breath 
Breathes, and is born at her birth; 

For they knew thee for mother of love, 
And knew thee not mother of death. 

"What had'st thou to do being born, 
Mother, when winds were at ease, 
As a flower of the springtime of corn, 

A flower of the foam of the seas ? 
For bitter thou wast from thy birth. 

Aphrodite, a mother of strife; 
For before thee some rest was on earth. 
A little respite from tears, 
A little pleasure of life; 



— ''but thee 
Who shall discern or declare ? 
In the uttermost ends of the sea 
The light of thine eyelids and hair, 
The light of thy bosom as fire 
Between the wheel of the Sun 
And the flying flames of the air ? 
Wilt thou turn thee not yet nor have pity 
Have mercy, mother !" 



5* 

It is hard to reconcile with so noble an invoca- 
tion, instinct with impassioned fervor, the lurid erot- 
ism of Swinburne's earlier verse. 

But what shall we make of Walt Whitman — that 
esoteric eruption of all known natural and supernat- 
ural forces, fish, flesh, and fowl, thunderbolts and 
lapping of gentle waters, entrancing music of the 
spheres and terrifying discords shrieking from the 
nether regions — all cast pell-mell into the witches' 
cauldron? Is this the primitive he-goat, adorable 
symbol of ancient Priapus, become incarnate in the 
nineteenth century offspring of man ? Who shall re- 
strain the sexual fury of this fierce desire ? We are 
told that the chaotic medley "Leaves of Grass' ' is 
the god-like genius of the universal and divine; that 
Homer and Skakspere and Milton are weak — this 
is strong. Yes, too strong, even rank and smell- 
ing to high heaven, we are tempted to reply. Yet 
softly ; this titanic utterance we know hurtles through 
our bewildered senses from the lips and heart of one 
whose life was sans peur et sans reproche, whose daily 
relations with fellow-men were singularly pure, and 
whose self-sacrificing spirit knew no limit in its yearn- 
ing affection for the lowliest semblance of humanity. 
We know, moreover, that even this ferocious animal- 
ism appealed to men of letters of the highest distinc- 
tion, to whom, one would have supposed, Whitman's 



S3 

conceptions of the nature and office of the art of 
poetry must have been wholly repellant. We will 
recall one of his sincerest admirers, the poet Brown- 
ing, who himself wrote in " Women and Roses :" — 

"Deep as drops from a statue's plinth, 
The bee sucked in by the hyacinth, 
So will I bury me while burning, 
Quench like him at a plunge my yearning; 
Eyes in your eyes, lips on your lips ! 
Fold me fast where the cincture slips, 
Prison all my soul in eternities of pleasure, 
Girdle me for once ! But no— the old measure 
They circle their rose on my rose-tree." 

A similar sensual craving, although differing in 
sex and motive, occurs in the Provencal, thus ren- 
dered by Swinburne : — 

" Nay, slay me now; nay, for I will be slain, 
Pluck thy red pleasure from the teeth of pain, 
Break down thy vine ere yet grape-gatherers prune, 
Slay me ere day can slay desire again ! 
Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon!" 

Browning — to quote from Colin A. Scott again — 
expressing this feminine subserviency more del- 
icately, says : 

"Bea god and hold me 
With a charm ! 
Be a man and hold me 
With thine arm! 



54 

" Teach me, only teach Love! 
As I ought, 
I will speak thy speech, Love, 
Think thy thought — 

*' Meet, if thou require it, 
Both demands, 
Laying flesh and spirit 
In thy hands." 

We are dealing now with one of the subtlest 
phenomena of human passion, in which the danger 
of an erroneous judgment is enhanced by vital differ- 
ences in the point of view, according to individual 
consciousness and interpretation. Other passions or 
emotions — love and hate, hope and fear, egoism and 
altruism and the like — are more or less tangential to 
one another, or, as Emerson says of ill-assorted com- 
panionships, they " touch as spheres." Here, how- 
ever, there is a psychological medium in which the 
physical and emotional elements are fused, and pre- 
cise comprehension is baffled. " When the sex pas- 
sion becomes divorced from the expression of true 
love," says Dr. Luther Gulick, " and is used as an end 
in itself— the production of pleasure — then the higher 
capacity for love fades away. . . . The person who 
cultivates passion as an end loses the capacity for 
love in all of its higher forms. . . . Impurity 
strikes at the very root of all love and blights all 
the love life of the individual.' ' There is no argu- 



_55_ 
mentum ad hominem to aid us in elucidating the 
mystery through whose instrumentality the most di- 
verse, the most fleeting and enduring sensibilities of 
body, soul, and intellect are imperceptibly com- 
mingled. We have cited, for instance, a truly erotic 
transport of Browning, capable of the most thought- 
less misconstruction. We know from the " Love 
Letters,' ' graciously given to the world as a radiant 
exemplar of all that is sweetest and noblest in true 
love, that his sentiments were of the most exalted, 
reverential nature, comparable only with those of his 
rare and spiritual wife. 

One poet, above all others, smote the deepest chords 
of human passion as with an angel hand. In the 
purifying alembic of Shelley's etherealized imagina- 
tion nothing could remain sullied. His delicate 
spirit, attuned to the subtlest vibrations of human 
emotion, now soaring into celestial realms of fancy, 
now palpitating with mortal feeling, could abide only 
the unstained and noble.* It is well to linger over 
these stanzas in "The Revolt of Islam," wherein 
the breath of purest genius is exhaled and sexual de- 
sire is transfigured. 



* Speaking of the properties of flame, methought Shelley's 
poetry emitted a purer light than almost any productions of 
his day, contrasting beautifully with the fitful and lurid gleams 
and gusts of black vapor that flashed and eddied from the 
volumes of Lord Byron. — Hawthorne. "Earth's Holocaust" 
— Mosses from an Old Manse, 



^- 6 _ 

<<: The autumnal winds, as if spell-bound, had made 
A natural couch of leaves in that recess, 
Which seasons none disturbed, but, in the shade 
Of flowering parasites, did spring love to dress 
With their sweet blooms the wintry loneliness 
Of those dead leaves, shedding their stars whene'er 
The wandering wind her nurselings might caress; 
Whose intertwining fingers ever there 
Made music wild and soft that filled the listening air. 

"We know not where we go, or what sweet dream 
May pilot us through caverns strange and fair 
Of far and pathless passion, while the stream 
Of life our bark doth on its whirlpools bear, 
Spreading swift wings as sails to the dim air: 
Nor should we seek to know, so the devotion 

Of love and gentle thoughts be heard still there 
Louder and louder from the utmost ocean 
Of universal life, attuning its commotion. 

' ' To the pure all things are pure ! Oblivion wrapt 
Our spirits, and the fearful overthrow 
Of public hope was from our being snapt, 

Though linked years had bound it there; for now 
A power, a thirst, a knowledge, which below 
All thoughts, like light beyond the atmosphere, 
Clothing its clouds with grace, doth ever flow, 
Came on us, as we sate in silence there, 
Beneath the golden stars of the clear azure air: — 

' ' In silence which doth follow talk that causes 

The baffled heart to speak with sighs and tears, 
When wildering passion swalloweth up the pauses 
Of inexpressive speech ; — the youthful years 
Which we together passed, their hopes and fears, 



57 

The blood itself which ran within our frames, 
That likeness of the features which endears 
The thoughts expressed by them, our very names, 
And all the winged hours which speechless memory claims. 

" Had found a voice: — and, ere that voice did pass, 

The night grew damp and dim, and, through a rent 
Of the ruin where we sate, from the morass, 
A wandering Meteor by some wild wind sent, 
Hung high in the green dome, to which it lent 
A faint and pallid lustre ; while the song 

Of blasts, in which its blue hair quivering bent, 
Strewed strangest sounds the moving leaves among; 
A wondrous light, the sound as of a spirit's tongue. 

" The Meteor showed the leaves on which we sate, 
And Cythna's glowing arms, and the thick ties 
Of her soft hair which bent with gathered weight 
My neck near hers, her dark and deepening eyes, 
Which, as twin phantoms of one star that lies 
O'er a dim well move though the star reposes, 

Swam in our mute and liquid ecstasies, 
Her marble brow, and eager lips, like roses, 
With their own fragrance pale, which Spring but half uncloses, 

1 ' The Meteor to its far morass returned : 
The beating of our veins one interval 
Made still; and then I felt the blood that burned 
Within her frame mingle with mine, and fall 
Around my heart like fire ; and over all 
A mist was spread, the sickness of a deep 

And speechless swoon of joy, as might befall 
Two disunited spirits when they leap 
In union from this earth's obscure and fading sleep. 



ic Was it one moment that confounded thus 
All thought, all sense, all feeling, into one 
Unutterable power, which shielded us 

Even from our own cold looks, when we had gone 
Into a wide and wild oblivion 
Of tumult and of tenderness? or now 

Had ages, such as make the moon and sun, 
The seasons and mankind, their changes know, 
Left fear and time unfelt by us alone below? 

" I know not. What are kisses whose fire clasps 
The failing heart in languishment, or limb 
Twined within limb ? or the quick dying gasps 
Of the life meeting, when the faint eyes swim 
Through tears of a wide mist boundless and dim, 
In one caress ? What is the strong control 

Which leads the heart that dizzy steep to climb 
Where far over the world those vapours roll 
Which blend two restless frames in one reposing soul ? 

"It is the shadow which doth float unseen, 

But not unfelt, o'er blind mortality, 
Whose divine darkness fled not from that green 

And lone recess, where lapped in peace did lie 

Our linked frames, till from the changing sky 
That night and still another day had fled; 

And then I saw and felt." 

Could the most exacting realism ask more than 
this? Yet so essentially chaste is the treatment of 
the theme, so tenderly affectionate, so imbued with 
religious feeling, that we cannot compare with Shel- 
ley's fine emotion, the meretricious vapidity of Bal- 



59 



zac, Gautier, and Zola — not to mention the horde 
of lesser erotists to whom the poet's spirituel 
could by no possibility appeal.* Indeed, save in 
Michelet's more philosophical treatise " 1/ Amour," 
the Gallic mind appears well-nigh incapable of the 
most refined sentiment concerning " the divine pas- 
sion." The national conscience seems expressed in 
the brutalism " Chaque femme a son quart d' heitre" 
Other peoples have progressed, or made some head- 
way in behalf of chastity and honor — the Gaul alone 
remains true to his hereditary lachetd ; indeed, the 
latest degeneracy, blazoned in Offenbach and the 
damnatory can-can, perhaps, surpasses all previous 
manifestations of innate depravity. One has, more- 
over, but to glance at the Salon exhibitions of the 
present day, to perceive that art, as well as manners 
and literature, is under the baneful spell of this 
lascivious penchant. The comparatively venial amours 
of Abelard and Heloise, the era of Chateaubriand 
and Cousin, and the purer conceptions of artistic 
genius once the glory of Paris, have yielded to a de- 
moralized, morbid taste for ephemeral concupiscence 
and attainment, devoid of ennobling passion. Is it 
surprising that the nation bends like grass to the 
sickle before the avenging blade of Teuton virility? 

* Shelley — "a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in 
the void his luminous wings in vain." — Matthew Arnold, 
11 Essays in Criticism,' 1 



6o 

We are ascending from the gross and material, 
whether in form or sentiment, to the spiritual and 
ideal, as embodied in human utterance, and still 
hover upon the borderland of two dominating pas- 
sions — lust and love. We long for a draught of 
clear mountain air, the balmy odor of upland pines, 
and murmur of crystal streams, that we may, while 
yet in quest of the eternal verities of life, fearlessly 
pursued, forget the mists that shroud the valley's 
deeps, and for a space unfold the flower of our being 
to the golden air. Here is a beam of clear sunlight 
from which the motes that haunt the lowlands have 
been filtered by the winds of heaven. We quote 
from James Lane Allen's " Aftermath :' ' — 

' ' Although we have now been two months mar- 
ried, I have not yet captured the old uncapturable 
loveliness of nature which has always led me and still 
leads me on in the person of Georgiana. I know 
but too well that I never shall. The charm in her 
which I pursue, but never overtake, is part and par- 
cel of that ungraspable beauty of the world which 
forever foils the sense while it sways the spirit — of 
that elusive, infinite splendor of God which flows 
from afar into all terrestrial things, filling them as 
color fills the rose. Even while I live with Georgiana 
in the closest of human relationships, she retains for 



6i 

me the uncomprehended brightness and freshness of 
a dream that does not end and has no waking. 

This but edges yet more sharply the eagerness of 
my desire to enfold her entire self into mine. We 
have been a revelation to each other, but the revela- 
tion is not complete ; there are curtains behind cur- 
tains, which one by one we seek to lift as we pen- 
etrate more deeply into the discoveries of our union. 
Sometimes she will seek me out and, sitting beside 
me, put her arm around my neck and look long into 
my eyes, full of a sort of beautiful, divine wonder at 
what I am, at what love is, at what it means for a 
man and woman to live together as we live. Yet, 
folded to me thus, she also craves a still larger fulfil- 
ment. Often she appears to me hovering on the 
outside of a too solid sphere, seeking an entrance to 
where I really am. Even during the intimate silences 
of the night we try to reach one another through the 
throbbing walls of flesh — we but cling together across 
the lone, impassable gulfs of individual being/ ' 

Here, at least, are no shadows to obscure the por- 
traiture of perfect love — the very arcana of so elevated 
a passion are made holy. 

" It is too clear a brightness for man's eye; 
Too high a wisdom for his wits to find; 
Too deep a secret for his sense to try; 

And all too heavenly for his earthly mind; 



62 



It is a grace of such a glorious kind 
As gives the soul a secret power to know it, 
But gives the heart nor spirit power to show it. 

1 It is of heaven and earth the highest beauty, 

The powerful hand of heaven and earth's creation, 
The due commander of all spirits' duty, 
The Deity of angels' adoration : 
The glorious substance of the soul's salvation; 
The light of truth that all perfection trieth, 
And life that gives the life that never dieth." 

— Nicholas Breton, 1601. 

" O Love, they wrong thee much 
That say thy sweet is bitter, 
When thy rich fruit is such 
As nothing can be sweeter. 
Fair house of joy and bliss 
Where truest pleasure is, 
I do adore thee; 
I know thee what thou art, 
I serve thee with my heart, 
And fall before thee." 

— Capt. Tobias Hume, 1605. 

44 Thou all sweetness dost enclose, 
Like a little world of bliss; 
Beauty guards thy looks, the rose 
In them pure and eternal is: 
Come, then, and make thy flight 
As swift to me as heavenly light." 

— Thomas Campion, circa, 1617, 



6 3 

The love-poems and madrigals of the Elizabethan 
era are replete with delicate sentiments such as these. 

But we must still linger amid the gloom and mys- 
tery of the unknown land we have sought to explore. 
Art, too, has found expression of the sexual impulse 
we have seen exemplified in literature, though in 
less subtle gradations of fleshly and spiritual desire, 
since the aesthetic faculty is influenced rather by 
outward, visible impressions than by imaginative re- 
flection. Let us illustrate. 

There is a famous painting by Correggio, known 
to all lovers of art, and frequently awakening 
ignorant enthusiasm among the chastest and most 
guileless of men and women — the beautiful "Io," 
chiefly familiar through the upturned countenance 
and gleaming shoulders enclosed in circular setting. 
A connoisseur instantly detects the face of Jupiter 
barely looming in the background of deep chiaros- 
curo. The blissful languishment of the fair goddess 
might be, and is to those unacquainted with art or 
Grecian mythology, the rapture of a simple kiss : in 
reality, as the full painting reveals, the panting thrill 
that illumines the contenance of Io, portrays the 
most exquisitely voluptuous sensation known to flesh 
and blood — the "speechless swoon of joy " which 
accompanies the human orgasm. 

Yet this same Correggio paid inspired tribute to 



64 

the religious sentiment and the world of art in the 
most spiritual portraitures of Saints and types of 
beatific joy and innocence scarcely surpassed by 
Raphael. How reconcile the purely devotional with 
the impurely sensual? Ah, but is Io's sweet rapture 
impure? This is the psychological and sexual prob- 
lem. 

The paintings of Guido Reni represent the ex- 
tremes of voluptuous desire and the exalted emotion 
which produced the most touchingly pathetic " Mater 
Dolorosa" — " And there stood by the cross of Jesus 
his mother. " 

The divine Raphael gave to religion its sublimest 
masterpiece of art, the Sistine Madonna, and Titian 
produced one of the noblest conceptions of Christ — 
the mistresses of both are immortalized through their 
portraits. Kaulbach illustrated with rare delicacy of 
feeling the chastest and sweetest of German lyrics; 
yet he prostituted his genius by one of the most 
lecherous fancies that ever polluted canvas. 

These examples of aesthetic incongruity might 
easily be multiplied; and the same coexistence of 
refinement and vulgarity finds abundant instances in 
the history of mankind. In a Cleopatra, as in a 
Messalina, we perceive the depths of riotous indul- 
gence to which lust can descend ; Pericles, the young 
Augustus of his age, who brought the highest glory 



to Athenian art and letters, took for a paramour the 
enchanting Aspasia : the Egyptian courtesan has 
been glowingly celebrated by an essentially chaste 
mind — that of Shakspere — while the Athenian lovers 
received their apotheosis through the genius of 
Landor, one of the rarest spirits of the century. 
The supremely beautiful description of Eve in " Par- 
adise Lost" shows how gladly even Puritan Milton 
rendered homage to feminine charms, and the triumph 
of the courtesan Phryne over the Areopagus to whom 
her radiant loveliness was exposed, further attests 
man's uncontrollable delight in the irresistible graces 
of woman. 

But we need not revert to the past to emphasize 
sexual enchantment. In recent years the most bril- 
liant and the most god-fearing of men and women 
have succumbed to illicit infatuation prompted by 
inordinate sexual desire — phenomenal lapses, in 
England as well as in America, having shaken the 
fabric of society to its foundations. They affirm in- 
contestably that, in striving to comprehend the psy- 
chological nature of the vita sexua/is, the highest 
culture, the brightest intellectual gifts, and the most 
distinguished environment are intimately associated 
with clearly atavistic degeneration as determining 
influences in the display of human passion. For- 
tunate is it for the stability of society and the per- 



66 

manency of virtue, that, as we confidently believe 
and as overwhelming evidence confirms, the derelic- 
tions from purity of life and character bear but a 
slight ratio to the general community. Yet we must 
beware of confounding ignorance with true chastity. 
An observer of social relations will readily perceive 
that, even among the virtuous and circumspect, there 
are frequent indications of private, personal thoughts 
which in their last analysis belie outward unsuscep- 
tibility to aught unclean. 

Prudery may be not inaptly defined as the affecta- 
tion of innocence, therefore logically implying guilt 
— somewhere " the little rift within the lute" that 
mars the natural melody of the soul, and suggests a 
consciousness of evil meditations. There is a maid- 
enly modesty, instinctive in its nature, that shrinks 
from the contemplation of nudity, or the perusal of 
insidious literature : there is also an abnormal, exag- 
gerated disparagement of truth, especially as ex- 
pressed in art, which is but self-confession. The 
former blushes, and is silent — the latter does not 
change color, and raves. A few illustrations will 
suffice to make the matter clear. 

" The sinful painter drapes his goddess warm. 
Because she still is naked, being dressed: 
The god-like sculptor will not so deform 

Beauty, which limbs and flesh enough invest." 

— Emerson. 



67 

The " Bacchante" episode in the pseudo-" Athens 
of America" is a case in point. The figure cannot 
be regarded as an especially appropriate ornament 
for a great public library; but the contention which 
arose touching its nudity is laughable enough to an 
intelligent lover of art or to a student of human na- 
ture. Worse still, in its gross ignorance and abso- 
lute admission of impure thoughts, was the action of 
certain women who sounded the cymbals and beat 
the tom-toms in the Salvation Army (sic), to whose 
beatific vision certain cherubic emblems in Omaha 
were offensive as harlots. We have heard, too, of a 
stultified proposal to drape statuary in the Art Insti- 
tute of Toledo, and the writer has been an ocular 
witness of the substitution of the phallic* fig-leaf for 
the innocent genitalia of "The Adoring Genius" in 
a prominent western city. A more remarkable pub- 
lication of prudery, however, of which he was also 
personally cognizant, occurred in that same New 
England Athens some years ago. Together with 
thousands of others daily passing close by, he watched 
the gradual completion of the Crispus Attacks' Memo- 
rial. The cylindrical shaft — itself a phallic emblem 
— being raised to its position, the workmen pro- 



* In Phallicism the fig tree was regarded with special ven- 
eration—the tri-lobed leaf symbolizing the male reproductive 
organs, and the fruit, from natural resemblance, the uterus. 



68 

ceeded to finish the cap-stone. Probably very few- 
minds conceived any suggestiveness in the column as 
it stood; but when that fatal accessory assumed, under 
the very eyes of a nineteenth century public, the per- 
fect semblance of the human prepuce, there was con- 
sternation mingled with smiles and blushes. The 
self-conscious refutation of pure-thoughtedness cul- 
minated in the removal of the convicting cap-stone 
not long after its adjustment, and its replacement 
by a pointed terminal, the completed shaft of granite, 
now looking for all the world like a gigantic, but 
chaste, and well-sharpened slate-pencil. 

So much for the true motives of an era of civiliza- 
tion which imagines itself somehow — possibly be- 
cause of the fancied perfection of modern culture — 
allied to Arcadian innocence and simplicity. 



6 9 



"Wherever God erects a house of prayer, 
The Devil always builds a chapel there." 

— Defoe. 

We have thus far considered the aspects of sexual 
phenomena in their more secular relations, from the 
far remote epoch when Phalli cism was actually a prev- 
alent religion to the differentiated worship of the 
present day, through whose impress the ancient faith, 
among the more progressive nations of the world, 
has been supplanted by the thought and manners of 
Christianity. We have, naturally in vain, sought to 
find some clew to the mystery attending the man- 
ifestations of concupiscence and continent exercise 
of the amatory instinct, either co-existent or distinct, 
discovering only their mutual origin in the domina- 
tion of the sexual principle. It is now opportune to 
consider the bearings of lust and love upon the reli- 
gious sentiment, in many minds associated only 
with " whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things 
are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report. 7 ' 
We shall see whether the most devout adherence to 
ecclesiastical tenets and ethical prescriptions neces- 
sarily confers immunity from carnal desires and prac- 
tices. 

Recurring to primitive history we have in Phal- 
licism the earliest relation of the sexual principle to 



7Q 

the Creative Energy symbolized in this ancient faith. 
Passing from the original Chaldean and subsequent 
evolutions of oriental theogony to the pure pantheism 
of Greek mythology, we find that, while the basic 
worship of Priapus still reverts to Assyrian and Baby- 
lonian conceptions of Deity, an elaborate system of 
lesser divinities, ruled by a celestial hierarchy, has 
been grafted upon the earlier, simpler belief. It 
was characteristic of Greek thought to invest even 
the ordinary affairs of life with tutelary supervision, 
so that the multitude of gods and goddesses formed 
a goodly company of major and minor deities. 

" Men read into nature," observes Dr. Gulick, 
"what they find in themselves. The gods of any 
people are of necessity constructed from such ideals 
as exist in the lives of the people. Reproduction in 
all higher forms of life is sexual. So by parity of 
reasoning many of their gods must be related to sex- 
ual matters. 

"It is most natural then that the gods having to do 
with fertility and reproduction should in almost all 
lands have been of special prominence, and when we 
remember that in the worship of any god his special 
power or function is usually recognized in some de- 
finite way, we can readily see how sexual practices 
may easily have become identified with the worship 
of these deities." . . . "A distinction," he 



adds, "should be made between those religions in 
which these practices were done as part of the wor- 
ship, symbolizing in some way the special attributes 
of the god, and those in which there was mere 
license." These remarks apply equally to the rites 
of the earlier Phallic faith and the worship of Priapus 
in Greece and Italy descended therefrom. But since 
the procreative instinct in man typified the highest 
conception of dignity and power, the exercise of 
sexual functions on the part of a deity filled the 
Greek mind with veneration. Consequently innu- 
merable liaisons, as we see in Ovid's " Meta- 
morphoses," came to establish a legendary mythol- 
ogy of many and intricate relationships. The amours 
of Zeus himself were innumerable, the deity resort- 
ing to various disguises for purposes of amatory con- 
quest — as Lily says : " Did not Jupiter transform 
himself into the shape of Amphitrio to embrace 
Alcmaena ; into the form of a swan to enjoy Leda 5 
into a bull to beguile Io ; into a shower of gold to 
win Danae?" And Burton in his "Anatomy of 
Melancholy ' ' remarks : ' ' Jupiter himself was turned 
into a satyr, a shepherd, a bull, a swan, a golden 
shower, and what not for love." 

What does the world not owe to that sensuous 
and refined, rather than sensual, pantheism ! It 
fired the genius of Sophocles, and Aeschylus, and 



72 

gave us their immortal trilogies; it reared to its 
divinities temples whose classic grace and beauty- 
have never been approached, and, in forms of majes- 
tic proportion and entrancing loveliness, exhausted 
the divine art conceived in inspired visions and ren- 
dered imperishable by the sculptor's chisel. Ill in- 
deed could mankind spare the heroism of the "An- 
tigone," the nobility of the Parthenon — grandly 
impressive in its very ruins, the Faun of Praxiteles, 
the Adoring Genius and the Venus of Milo — even 
in her mutilated form beautiful beyond comparison. 
We can smile at and forget the royal escapades of 
deities who could so inspire their worshippers : had 
they been even worse, Art must have been still more 
enriched. 

The enchanted vales of Arcady had scarce exhaled 
their last lingering perfume, when Judaism, uncon- 
scious of art or beauty, proclaimed the pitiless ethics 
of the Mosaic Law. No more shall Jove, descend- 
ing from Olympus girt with light and majesty, wan- 
der incognito among the unsuspecting maidens of 
his desire ; no more Pluto break the heart of poor 
Proserpine, nor Apollo pursue his Daphne or leave his 
longing Clytie to weep away her sorrow by the 
stream. < ' Thou shall not covet ' ' — and the stern in- 
terdiction was, with the advent of Christianity, made 
doubly terrible : " But I say unto you, that whoso- 



73 

ever looketh on a woman to lust after her " — the ep- 
itaph of Olympian prerogative. 

" What is the organic relation in the individual 
between sex and religion: is there such a thing ?' ' 
asks Dr. Gulick, "We note first that at puberty 
and immediately following it is the time of crisis in 
the moral nature. We have shown that the great 
bulk of those who are to become criminals, become 
so during the later adolescent period. We have 
shown that the years from ten to eighteen were the 
years of the chief accession to the criminal ranks in 
the whole of the United States. 

" Another crisis in the moral nature is shown by a 
study of conversion. Our tables show that if one is 
to become a Christian, the probability of his becom- 
ing so between the ages of twelve and twenty are as 
three and one-half to one. In other words, that for 
every person who becomes a Christian before twelve 
or during all the years after twenty, three and one- 
half become Christians between twelve and twenty. 
We showed that not only in the Christian religions, 
but more or less in all religions, there is a recogni- 
tion of this dawning of the religious life at puberty. 
The Episcopal, and many other churches select this 
time for confirmation. ' ' 

Elsewhere he says : " God seems to have selected 
this period as peculiarly a period of religious suscep- 



74 

tibility. . . . Circumcision is a rite largely prac- 
tised at this period. It typifies the new life, the new 
birth, the change from boyhood to manhood." 

This religious receptivity in early life has been fre- 
quently noted by careful observers. It seems as 
though the agitation caused by a mysterious access 
of vitality, and the consciousness of physical changes 
of momentous, though unknown, import, predisposed 
the troubled mind to seek repose within the shelter- 
ing guidance of religion. Weir (" Religion and 
Lust"), boldly asserts that " young married men and 
women, who are in perfect sexual health, who have 
not experienced religion before marriage, seldom 
give this emotion a single thought until late in life, 
when both libido and vita scxualis are on the wane 
or are extinct." The author aptly remarks in 
this connection : " Voltaire cynically, though truth- 
fully, observes that when woman is no longer pleas- 
ing to man, she then turns to God." 

The most remarkable phenomena attesting the 
relationship between sexual feeling and religious 
emotion occur in psycho-pathological conditions. 
Kraft-Ebing calls attention to the fact : " Ail through 
the history of insanity the student has occasion to 
observe the close alliance of sexual and religious 
ideas; 'an alliance/ says Spitzka, ' which may be 
partly accounted for because of the prominence 



75 

which sexual themes have in most creeds, as illus- 
trated in ancient times by the phallus worship of the 
Egyptians, the ceremonies of Friga Cultus of the Sax- 
ons, the frequent and detailed reference to sexual 
topics in the Koran and several books of the kind, 
and which is further illustrated in the performances 
which, to come down to a modern period, char- 
acterize the religious revival and camp-meeting. ' " 

It is noteworthy that these accesses of religious 
devotion are wont to affect young girls and unmar- 
ried women more than the opposite sex. The secret 
of this fact is aptly suggested by Weir: " Men, 
owing to their greater freedom, soon learn the differ- 
ence of the sexes, and the delights of sexual congress. 
Women, hedged in by conventionalities and deterred 
by their innate passivity, remain, for the most part, 
in ignorance of sexual knowledge until their mar- 
riage.' ' 

Religious conviction in all ages has been the most 
powerful incentive to human action. We have but 
to recall the history of the Crusades and the conten- 
tions which for centuries convulsed the distracted 
factions of the Church in Western Europe, cul- 
minating in the Reformation, to understand the 
power of fanatic zeal when operative under the sanc- 
tion of Religion. In diversified forms, from the 
dancing mania of the Middle Ages to the melan- 



76 

choly hallucinations of witchcraft, the influence of 
religious thought upon the imagination has been man- 
ifested. "An overstrained bigotry/ ' says Hecker, 
"is, in itself, and considered in a medical point of 
view, a destructive irritation of the senses, which 
draws men away from the efficiency of mental free- 
dom, and peculiarly favors the most injurious emo- 
tions. Sensual ebullitions, with strong convulsions 
of the nerves, appear sooner or later, and insanity, 
suicidal disgust of life, and incurable nervous dis- 
orders, are but too frequently the consequences of a 
perverse, and, indeed, hypocritical zeal, which has 
ever prevailed, as well in the assemblies of the Mae- 
nades and Corybantes of antiquity, as under the 
semblance of religion among the Christians and Mo- 
hammedans. " 

The Convulsionnaires, whose demonomania lasted 
until the close of the eighteenth century, were ad- 
dicted to the most extravagant vagaries when under 
the spell of religious excitement. " The grossest im- 
morality found, in the secret meetings of the be- 
lievers, a sure sanctuary, and, in their bewildering 
devotional exercises, a convenient cloak." The 
English Methodists forming the sect of Jumpers are 
said to have indulged in practices similar to those of 
the Convulsionnaires. "There is no doubt/ ' ob- 
serves Clouston, "that the religious instinct of men 



77 

being one of the deepest and most central parts of his 
psychological constitution, and often cultivated and 
developed from childhood in a way that few of his 
other faculties are, when perverted causes intense gen- 
eral emotional disturbance.' ' Among the cases of in- 
sanity adduced by the same author, three of women 
are cited in which religious monomania was directly 
traceable to amenorrhoea or other functional uterine 
disturbance, showing clearly the intimate relation 
between the physical phenomena of the vita sexualis 
and the melancholic or delusional states of mind in 
which they terminate. Among the delusions of mel- 
ancholia in women are instanced those of being preg- 
nant, being raped, having venereal disease, and being 
a man. 

In this connection Kraft-Ebing notes " how in- 
tense sensuality makes itself manifest in the clinical 
history of many religious maniacs ; the motley mix- 
ture of religious and sexual delusions that is so fre- 
quently observed in psychosis — e. g., in maniacal 
women who think they are or will be the mother of 
God, resulting from abnormal religio- sexual feeling." 

"Of all the insanities of the pubescent state," 
says Weir, " erotomania and religious mania are the 
most frequent and the most pronounced. Some- 
times they go hand in hand, the most inordinate 
sensuality being coupled with abnormal religious zeal. 



78 

A young lady of my acquaintance, whose conduct 
has given rise to much scandal, is, at times, a rein- 
carnate Messalina, while at other times she is the 
very embodiment of ethical and religious purity.' ' 

Another instance is cited of a young girl, in whom 
the vita sexualis was about to be established, who, 
becoming religiously insane, " had delusions in which 
she declared that she was in heaven and sitting at the 
right hand of God. She declared this over and over 
again, while shamelessly guilty of manustupration I" 
Sexual, cruel self-punishment, self-castration, and 
even self-crucifixion have been known to result from 
delusional religio-mania, a remarkable instance of the 
latter being given by Berghierri, showing the close 
correlation of religious emotion and sexual desire in 
psychopathic individuals — " The man in question, 
who had been intensely sensual, manufactured a cross, 
nailed himself to it, and ingeniously managed to 
suspend himself and cross from the window of his 
sleeping apartment." 

The asceticism enjoined by the Roman Catholic 
Church among the priesthood and those assuming 
the celebate, as one might naturally suppose, has 
often been productive of sexual aberrations. The 
nun Blanbekin was distressed to know what had be- 
come of the circumcised foreskin of Christ; in an 
ecstasy of ungratified libido, St. Catharine of Genoa 



79 

would frequently cast herself on the hard floor of her 
cell, crying: " Love ! love! I can endure it no 
longer ;" St. Armelle and St. Elizabeth were troubled 
with libido for the child Jesus, while an old prayer is 
quite significant : " Oh, that I had found thee, Holy 
Emanuel ; oh, that I had thee in my bed to bring 
delight to body and soul ! Come and be mine, and 
my heart shall be thy resting-place" (Kraft -Ebing). 
Francis Parkman is authority — and there can be 
none better — for the statement that nuns coming to 
America during the Colonial period were often seized 
with religio-sexual frenzy. Of Marie de 1' Incarna- 
tion he says : " She heard in a trance a miraculous 
voice. It was that of Christ, promising to become 
her spouse. Months and years passed, full of troubled 
hopes and fears, when again the voice sounded in 
her ear, with assurance that the promise was fulfilled, 
and that she was, indeed, his bride. Now ensued 
phenomena which are not infrequent among Roman 
Catholic female devotees, when unmarried, or mar- 
ried unhappily, and which have their source in the 
necessities of a woman's nature. To her excited 
thought, her divine spouse became a living presence; 
and her language to him, as recorded by herself, is 
of intense passion. She went to prayer, agitated and 
tremulous, as if to a meeting with an earthly lover. 
i Oh, my Love,' she exclaimed, ' when shall I em- 



8o 

brace you ? Have you no pity on the torments that 
I suffer ? Alas ! alas ! my Love, my Beauty, my 
Life ! Instead of healing my pain, you take pleasure 
in it. Come, let me embrace you, and die in your 
sacred arms ! ' M 

"The historian remarks," says Weir, from whom 
we quote, that " the < holy widow/ as her biographers 
call her, is an example, and a lamentable one, of the 
tendency of the erotic principle to ally itself with 
high religious excitement and enthusiasm." Park- 
man says later that " some of the pupils of Marie de 
T Incarnation also had mystical marriages with 
Christ ; and the impassioned rhapsodies of one of 
them being overheard, she nearly lost her character, 
as it was thought she was apostrophizing an earthly 
lover." A curious instance of perversion in religio- 
sexual feeling is the case of St. Veronica, who, ac- 
cording to Friedrich, was so enamored of the divine 
lion symbolizing St. Mark that she took a lion whelp 
to her bed, fondled it, kissed it, and allowed it to 
suck her breasts. 

To come down to our day, we are only too familiar 
with the "clerical errors" of those whose religious 
zeal has served but as a mask to disguise the most 
pronounced sensuality, one case especially having not 
long since been reported from the Pacific coast which, 
in its harrowing features, vividly recalled the story 



8i 

of Hester Prynne and her sanctimonious pastor, in 
"The Scarlet Letter." 

The above instances fairly establish the fact that, 
widely dissimilar as appear the motives which orig- 
inate religious emotion and sexual desire, and diver- 
gent as may be their psychical operations, there sub- 
sists between them an occult yet indissoluble bond. 
Probably, could we know the secret history of many 
a rigid adherent to church doctrines and observances, 
we should find that there is little occasion to scru- 
tinize the records of remote times and places to dis- 
cover what, there is every reason to believe, exists in 
our midst. It may be permissible in the writer to 
record in proof of this latter assertion a case, narrated 
to him by the broken-hearted lover, in which the 
sentiments of sexual desire and indubitable love were 
tragically interwoven. 

A young and beautiful girl, daughter of a clergy- 
man in one of our large Eastern cities, whose educa- 
tion, social position, and amiable qualities of mind 
and heart endeared her to her family and friends, 
was betrothed to a most worthy gentleman, state 
assay er, and greatly respected in the community. 
The engagement elicited congratulations from a 
host of friends ; the day of marriage was fixed, 
and apparently only happiness awaited the expectant 
pair, their mutual affection being genuine. Out of that 



82 

clear sky burst the thunderbolt; a fortnight before 
the appointed wedding-day, that saint-like young 
girl — teacher of a Sunday-school class and noted for 
her enthusiasm in religious and charitable work — with 
every token of remorse confessed that, deeply as she 
loved her fiance, her conscience would not permit 
her to marry him undeservingly : in a word, for a 
year past she had maintained illicit relations with 
another man, though with no thought of marriage. 
She therefore implored her lover to forget her, hum- 
bly asking his forgiveness. . . . The poor fellow 
was too horror-stricken to realize his full calamity. 
As if pursued by the Furies he fled to the Black 
Hills, where in a few years he amassed a considerable 
fortune. His spirit seemed entirely broken, and he 
smiled bitterly at the government bonds he drew 
from his pocket. He was now about starting for 
Venezuela, to engage in placer mining. 

'* It is decreed in God's great will, 
That all the heart of man doth fill 
With joy he must resign."* 

But the misery depicted on that care-worn face and 
his acknowledged hopelessness of closing that lethal 
wound are not easily forgotten. Truly it is as La 



* ' * Es ist bestimmt im Gottes Rath 

Dass man vom liebsten was man hat 
Muss scheiden." 



83 

Rochefoucauld says, " Nos passions ne cessent qu'avec 
la vie." 

It is indeed a chilling reflection that all the 
love and solicitude parental yearning can bestow, 
all that the most refined religious influences can 
offer, all that the most cultivated associations can 
accomplish, in one fateful moment may be obliterated 
in presence of an overwhelming libido. There is no 
room for ethical reasoning, indeed oftentimes no 
consciousness of wrong but only Margaret's " Es war 
so Suss!" the egoism of passion absorbing all other 
considerations. Whether the lapse be wholly vol- 
untary, or a surrender to insinuating persuasion, it is 
evident that for the time being the natural prompt- 
ings of conscience are silenced. It would further- 
more appear to an observer of sexual corruption 
among church members, that the finer and more sen- 
sitive the organization, the greater the danger of 
moral obliquity, coarser natures being either unsus- 
ceptible to the emotions occasioned by concupis- 
cence, or, if confronted by them, capable of effectual 
resistance. This coincides with the general law of 
compensation governing society, but is none the less 
lamentable. 



8 4 



" True love is that which ennobles the personality, fortifies 
the heart, and sanctifies existence." — Amiel. 



<c Love may be found in the heart of an anchorite; never in 
the heart of a libertine." — Legouve. 

" Eppur si muove" as Galileo dared assert in 
presence of the heinous Inquisition. Yes, the world 
does move, burdened as it is with sin and sorrow 
and the myriad silent tragedies that find no expres- 
sion among men. We have dwelt upon the darker 
side of human passion, linking lust with love, and 
candidly admitting their fundamental dependence 
upon the sexual instinct. Yet no philosopher can 
deny that, under the beneficent influences of a mighty 
faith whose glory is that it is founded upon Love, 
a nobler trust and purer morals have been diffused 
among mankind. Other systems of religion have 
held their votaries captive through the imagination 
— it was reserved for Christianity to touch the heart 
of man. And from that generous heart, attuned to 
finer feeling, pulsating with the kindliest, tenderest 
emotions, every day and every hour somewhere a ray 
of purest love goes forth to illumine the darkness of 
skepticism. Not a hamlet is there throughout the 
land but shelters some gentle affection, however ob- 
scure, that one day, perhaps to-morrow, shall make 



85 

the desert of its solitude " rejoice and blossom as the 
rose." 

In an early essay Emerson touches gracefully upon 
this rustic passion: " All mankind love a lover. 
The earliest demonstrations of complacency and 
kindness are nature's most winning pictures. It is 
the dawn of civility and grace in the coarse and rus- 
tic. The rude village boy teases the girls about the 
school-house door; — but to-day he comes running 
into the entry, and meets one fair child disposing her 
satchel; he holds her books to help her, and in- 
stantly it seems to him as if she removed herself from 
him infinitely, and was a sacred precinct. Among 
the throng of girls he runs rudely enough, but one 
alone distances him ; and these two little neighbors, 
that were so close just now, have learned to respect 
each other's personality. Or who can avert his eyes 
from the engaging, half-artful, half-artless ways of 
school-girls who go into the country shops to buy a 
skein of silk or a sheet of paper, and talk half an 
hour about nothing with the broad-faced, good-nat- 
ured shop-boy. In the village they are on a perfect 
equality, which love delights in, and without any 
coquetry the happy, affectionate nature of woman 
flows out in this pretty gossip. The girls may have 
little beauty, yet plainly do they establish between 
them and the good boy the most agreeable, confiding 



86 

relations, what with their fun and their earnest, 
about Edgar, and Jonas, and Almira, and who was 
invited to the party, and who danced at the dancing- 
school, and when the singing-school would begin, 
and other nothings concerning which the parties 
cooed. By and by that boy wants a wife ; and very 
truly and heartily will he know where to find a sincere 
and sweet mate, without any risk such as Milton de- 
plores as incident to scholars and great men." 

Again the poet-philosopher says: " But be our ex- 
perience in particulars what it may, no man ever 
forgot the visitations of that power to his heart and 
brain, which created all things new;* which was the 
dawn in him of music, poetry, and art ; which made 
the face of nature radiant with purple light, the 
morning and the night varied enchantments ; when 
a single tone of one voice could make the heart 
bound, and the most trivial circumstance associated 
with one form is put in the amber of memory ; when 
he became all eye when one was present, and all 
memory when one was gone ; when the youth be- 
comes a watcher of windows, and studious of a glove, 
a veil, a ribbon, or the wheels of a carriage ; when 
no place is too solitary, and none too silent, for him 
who has richer company and sweeter conversation in 



* Compare the awakening of Elsie Venner's soul through 
the revelation of her love. 



87 

his new thoughts, than any old friends, though best 
and purest, can give him ; for the figures, the mo- 
tions, the words of the beloved object are not like 
other images written in water, but, as Plutarch said, 
' enamelled in fire/ and make the study of midnight. 4 ' 
"In the noon and the afternoon of life we still 
throb at the recollection of days when happiness was 
not happy enough, but must be drugged with the 
relish of pain and fear ; for he touched the secret of 
the matter, who said of love, — 

* All other pleasures are not worth its pains ' ; 

and when the day was not long enough, but the 
night, too, must be consumed in keen recollections ; 
when the head boiled all night on the pillow with 
the generous deed it resolved on ; when the moon- 
light was a pleasing fever, and the stars were letters, 
and the flowers ciphers, and the air was coined into 
song; when all business seemed an impertinence, 
and all the men and women running to and fro in 



* In vacancy my life did move, 

My heart was sterile nothingness; 
Thou lookedst on me, sweet my love — 
A universe thy look did bless ! 

*' Era mi vida el lobrego vacio, 

Era mi corazon la esteril nada, 
Pero me viste tu, dulce amor mio, 
Y creome un universo tu mirada." 

— Fray Luis de Leon. 



the streets, mere pictures. . . . Passion beholds 
its object as a perfect unit. The soul is wholly em- 
bodied, and the body wholly ensouled. 

4 Her pure and eloquent blood 
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought, 
That one might almost say her body thought.' 

Romeo, if dead, should be cut up into little stars to 

make the heavens fine. Life, with this pair, has no 

other aim, asks no more, than Juliet, — than Romeo. 

That which is so beautiful and attractive as 

these relations must be succeeded and supplanted 

only by what is more beautiful, and so on for ever." 

This fine rapture, so eloquently portrayed by 
Emerson — who has not felt it ? Who believes that 
it has perished or that it can ever die? We have left 
the noiscme morass of lust, and stand upon the 
blessed heights of purer, nobler feeling. Granted 
that the sexual impulse is still present, the emotions 
it awakens are sublimated by a more ethereal insight 
and a more unearthly sense of the beautiful. 

Shakspere, in the interviews between Lorenzo and 
Jessica, draws, as ever with a master hand, the pic- 
ture of this exalted mood, kindled by the flame of 
holy love : — 

* Lor. How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank ! 
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music 
Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night 
Become the touches of sweet harmony. 



«9 

Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven 
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold. 
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st 
But in his motion like an angel sings, 
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubin: 
Such harmony is in immortal souls; 
But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay 
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it." 

And the cloying happiness of the moment is perhaps 
reflected in Jessica's pensive confidence : 

" I am never merry when I hear sweet music," 
Private, however, as is the passion of pure love in 
its intensity, and reserved and personal as are its 
sanctities, through bonds of kindred sympathy we 
are enabled to feel the beauty of the emotion in 
others, regardless of race and clime. Never was un- 
dying love more nobly and touchingly expressed 
than in that marvelous creation, the Taj Mahal,* at 



* The history and associations of the Taj are entirely 
poetic. It is a work inspired by Love and consecrated to 
Beauty. Shah Jehan, the Selim of Moore's poem, erected it 
as a mausoleum over his queen, Noor Jehan — 4 the Light of 
the World.' She is reputed to have been a woman of surpass- 
ing beauty, and of great wit and intelligence. Shah Jehan 
was inconsolable for her loss, and has immortalized her mem- 
ory in a poem, the tablets of which are marble, and the letters 
jewels: — for the Taj is poetry transmuted into form, and 
hence, when a poet sees it, he hails it with the rapture of a 
realized dream. Few persons, of the thousands who sigh over 
the pages of " Lalla Rookh," are aware that the Light of. the 
Harem was a real personage, and that her tomb is one of the 
wonders of the world. . . . Did you ever build a Castle 
in the Air? Here is one brought down to earth, and fixed for 



9° 

Agra, the last tribute of Shah Jehan to his favorite 
wife. It is a dream of beauty wrought in purest 
marble, every sculptured detail, every fretted ceiling 
and airy arabesque, every jewelled niche and lace- 
like lattice of which seems instinct with memorial 
homage. What must have been that lover's depth 
of affection! what must have been the woman, to 
shelter whose sacred dust was reared the fairest edifice 
on Earth ! To associate with the perennial fragrance 
of a veneration such as that the noisome miasma of 
grosser thought, born of mere sexual desire, were 
profanation. 

"I have just come across a statement that stern 
men, overpowered by the sight of it, have been 
known to burst into tears. We have seen it. Do 
not expect me to attempt a description of it, or to 
try to express my feelings. There are some subjects 
too sacred for analysis, or even words, and I know 
that there is a human structure so exquisitely fine, or 
unearthly, as to lift it into this holy domain." — 
Andrew Carnegie, " Round the World." 

The tendency to philosophical thought and deli- 
cious languor of meditative reverie peculiar to orien- 



the wonder of ages; yet so light it seems, so airy, and, when 
seen from a distance, so like a fabric of mist and sunbeams, 
with its great dome soaring up, a silvery bubble, about to 
burst in the sun, that, even after you have touched it, and 
climbed to its summit, you almost doubt its reality." — Bayard 
Taylor. " India, China and Japan." 



9 1 

talism, together with the seductive charm of natural 
loveliness amid which life was spent, predisposed the 
minds of dwellers in the East to love of the Beautiful, 
to reverential emotions, and amatory visions. Hindu 
and Persian poetry are permeated with delicacy of 
feeling and refined expression of sentiment. The 
" Rose Garden" of Sadi reflects, at times senten- 
tiously, this poetic interpretation of Life and Love : 

" Wide is the space twixt him who clasps his love, 
And him whose eyes watch for the door to move."* 

To a criticism of his sweetheart on the part of his 
royal master, the lover replies proudly : 

" O King ! It is requisite to survey the beauty of 
Laila from the windows of the eye of Majnun in 
order that the mystery of the spectacle may be re- 
vealed to you." 

4 ' That pearl is from a mine unknown to thee, 
That only bears a stamp thou canst not see, 
The tale of love some other tongue must tell, 
All our conjectures are but phantasy." 

The Persian poets, indeed, often reveal this lofty 
conception of love, as refined as it is ardent and 
imaginative. " The " Shah-Namah " of Firdusi 
contains a striking episode portraying the love of 
Rudabah and Zal : 



* In expectation of his beloved's approach. 



92 

(RudabaJi) " I am agitated with love like the raging ocean, 
Whose billows are heaved to the sky. 
My once bright heart is rilled with the love of Zal; 
My sleep is broken with thoughts of him, 
My soul is perpetually filled with my passion; 
Night and day my thoughts dwell upon his countenance." 

Being chided by her attendants, who deem Zal un- 
worthy of so fair a prize, she answers with spirit : 

11 You may call him as you please, an old man or a young; 
To me he is the room of heart and soul, 
Except him, never shall any one have a place in my heart." 

The lovers meet at last; and Rudabah greets the 
young warrior : 

"Welcome, thou brave and happy youth! 
The blessing of the Creator of the world be upon thee! 
On him who is the father of a son like thee! 
And destiny ever favor thy wishes! 

May the vault of heaven be the ground thou walkest on! 
The dark night is turned into day by thy presence! " 

And Zal replies : 

" O thou that sheddest the mild radiance of the moon, 
The blessing of heaven and mine be upon thee! 
How many nights hath cold Arcturus beholden me, 
Uttering my cry to God, the Pure, 
And beseeching the Lord of the universe 
That he would vouchsafe to unveil thy countenance before 
me' " 

The sequel is a most engaging picture of true and 
passionate, yet dignified, devotion. 



93 

Probably in all literature there exists no transcript 
of human love quite so tender in sentiment and of so 
ethereal a quality as the "Vita Nuova" of Dante. 
It is the very flower and fragrance of the poet's soul, 
called into being in rapturous childhood, nourished 
and watered with his tears through all the trials and 
sorrows of later experience, and shedding its linger- 
ing aroma upon the closing pages of" that mediaeval 
miracle of song" to which Dante's solemn years 
were consecrated. Listen to this homage to Beatrice : 

" Dice di lei Amor: Cosa mortale" — 

Love saith concerning her. " How chanceth it 

That flesh, which is of dust, should be thus pure?" 
Keen, gazing always, he makes oath: " Forsure, 
This is a creature of God till now unknown." 
She hath that paleness of the pearl that's fit 
In a fair woman, so much and not more; 
She is as high as Nature's skill can soar; 
Beauty is tried by her comparison. 
Whatever her sweet eyes are turned upon, 
Spirits of love do issue thence in flame, 

Which through their eyes who then may look on them 
Pierce to the heart's deep chamber every one, 
And in her smile loves image you may see; 

Whence none can gaze upon her steadfastly. — Rosetti. 

" Negli occhi porta la mia donna Amore" — 

My lady carries love within her eyes; 
All that she looks on is made pleasanter; 
Upon her path men turn to gaze at her, 



94 

And whom she greeteth feels his heart to rise, 
And droops his troubled visage, full of sighs, 

And of his evil heart is then aware: 

Hate loves, and pride becomes a worshipper. 
O women he'p to praise her in somewise. 
Humbleness, and the hope that hopeth well, 

By speech of hers into the mind are brought, 
And who beholds is blessed oftenwhiles. 
The look she hath when she a little smiles 

Cannot be said or holden in the thought; 
'Tis such a new and gracious miracle. — Rosetti. 

11 Tanto gentile e tanto honesta pare" — 

So gentle and so modest doth appear 
My lady when she giveth her salute, 
That every tongue becometh, trembling, meek; 
Nor do the eyes to look upon her dare. 

Although she hears her praises, she both go 
Benignly vested with humility; 
And like a thing come down, she seems to be, 
From heaven to earth, a miracle to show, 

So pleaseth she whoever cometh nigh, 

She gives the heart a sweetness through the eyes, 
Which none can understand who doth not prove. 

And from her countenance there seems to move 
A spirit sweet and in Love's very guise, 
Who to the soul, in going, sayeth: " Sigh! " 

— C. E. Norton, 

" Oltre la spera che piii larga gire " — 

Beyond the sphere which spreads to widest space 
Now soars the sigh that my heart sends above; 
A new perception born of grieving Love 



95 

Guideth it upward the untrodden ways. 
When it hath reached unto the end, and stays, 
It sees a lady round whom splendors move 
In homage; till, by the great light thereof 
Abashed, the pilgrim spirit stands at gaze. 
It sees her such that when it tells me this 
Which it hath seen, I understand it not, 
It hath a speech so subtle and so fine. 
And yet I know its voice within my thought 
Often remembereth me of Beatrice: 

So that I understand it, ladies mine. — Rosetti. 

So the child Beatrice Portinari became transfigured 
in Dante's fervent imagination; nor does the sacred 
image of her whom he loved so passionately forsake 
his gentle thoughts until spiritualized and rendered im- 
mortal in " II Paradiso." Scarce does literature rec- 
ord a loving constancy like this, a tender adoration 
which years could not diminish, which inspired with 
beatific visions the poet's secluded reverie, and illu- 
mined the lonely sorrows of exile. 

Widely different, yet touched by the pathos of true 
love, may be cited, in illustration of our theme, the 
deep emotions which stirred the bosom of forlorn 
Sappho, of whom Swinburne speaks feelingly, allud- 
ing to 

" The small dark body's Lesbian loveliness 
That held the fire eternal." 

Of the fragments of Sappho's verse which have 
come down to us the Ci Hymn to Venus" is best 



96 

known, containing much of the fervor of more mod- 
ern lyrics of this nature, and set to a music all her 
own. There is a girlish chiding in the poem, 
mingled with reverential awe, which captivates the 
heart, so that we lament the loss of that which fate 
has withheld from us. 

"O fickle-souled, deathless one, Aphrodite, 
Daughter of Zeus, weaver of wiles, I pray thee, 
Lady august, never with pangs and bitter 
Anguish affray me. 

But hither come often, as erst with favor 
My invocations pitifully heeding, 
Leaving thy sire's golden abode, thou earnest 
Down to me speeding. 



Come to me, then, loosen me from my torment, 
All my heart's wish unto fulfilment guide thou, 
Grant and fulfil! And an ally most trusty 

Ever abide thou." — Walhouse. 

Far finer is the passion of Elizabeth Barrett 
Browning — pure Greek in imagination, yet filled 
with the spirit of our century, and in her own refined 
yet glowing transports of woman's devotion express- 
ing the highest, purest quality of Saxon love. This, 
for instance : 



97 

LIFE AND LOVE. 



11 Fast this Life of mine was dying, 
Blind already and calm as death, 
Snowflakes on her bosom lying, 
Scarcely heaving with her breath. 

Love came by, and having known her 

In a dream of fabled lands, 
Gently stooped and laid upon her 

Mystic charm of holy hands; 

Drew her smile across her folded 

Eyelids, as the swallow dips; 
Breathed as finely as the cold did, 

Through the locking of her lips. 

So when Life looked upward, being 
Warmed and breathed on from above, 

What sight could she have for seeing 
Evermore— but only Love." 

It is the modern version of Cupid and Psyche — 
Love waking the Soul, as in the lovely group of 
Canova. But it is in " Sonnets from the Portu- 
guese " — a modest fiction to conceal her identity — 
that Mrs. Browning's love, as well as genius, finds its 
noblest utterance. The key to her exalted mood lies 
in such verses as these : 

" If thou dost love me let it be for naught 
Except for love's sake only — 

* * * * 

But love me for love's sake, that evermore 
Thou may'st love on through love's eternity." 



98 

Here are a few of these beautiful inspirations of 
her muse, from the ' ' Sonnets : ' ' 

XXVII. " My own beloved, who hast lifted me 

From this drear flat of earth where I was thrown, 
And, in betwixt the languid ringlets, blown 
A life-breath, til the forehead hopefully 
Shines out again, as all the angels see, 
Before thy saving kiss! My own, my own, 
Who earnest to me when the world was gone, 
And I who looked for only God, found thee ! 
I find thee, I am safe, and strong, and glad. 
As one who stands in dewless asphodel, 
Looks backward on the tedious time he had 
In the upper life, so I with bosom-swell, 
Make witness here between the good and bad, 
That Love, as strong as Death, retrieves as well. 

XXXVIII. " First time he kissed me he but only kissed 
The fingers of this hand wherewith I write; 
And ever since, it grew more clean and white, 
Slow to world-greetings, quick with its 'Oh, list,' 
When the angels speak. A ring of amethyst 
I could not wear here plainer to my sight, 
Than that first kiss. The second passed in height 
The first, and sought the forehead, and half missed, 
Half falling on the hair. Oh, beyond meed! 
That was the chrism of love, which love's own crown, 
With sanctifying sweetness did precede. 
The third upon my lips was folded down. 
In perfect, purple state; since when, indeed, 
I have been proud and said ' My love, my own,' 

XXI. " Say over again, and yet once over again, 

That thou dost love me. Though the word repeated 



99 

Should seem 'a cuckoo-song,' as thou dost treat it, 

Remember, never to the hill or plain, 

Valley and wood, without her cuckoo strain 

Comes the fresh Spring in all her green completed. 

Beloved, I, amid the darkness greeted 

By a doubtful spirit-voice, in that doubt's pain 

Cry, ' Speak once more — thou lovest ! ' Who can fear 

Too many stars, though each in heaven roll, 

Too many flowers, though each shall crown the year? 

Say thou dost love me, love me, love me — toll 

The silver iterance! — only minding, Dear, 

To love me also in silence with thy soul. 

XIX. " The soul's Rialto hath its merchandize, 
I barter curl for curl upon this mart, 
And from my poet's forehead to my heart 
Receive this lock which outweighs argosies, — 
As purply black as erst to Pindar's eyes 
The dim purpureal tresses gloomed athwart 
The nine white Muse-brows. For this counterpart, 
The bay-crown's shade, Beloved, I surmise, 
Still lingers on thy curl, it is so black! 
Thus, with a fillet of smooth — kissing breath, 
I tie the shadows safe from gliding back, 
And lay the gift where nothing hindereth; 
Here on my heart, as on thy brow, to lack 
No natural heat till mine grows cold in death. 

XXIII. " Then love me, love me, Love! look on me- 
breathe on me ! 
As brighter ladies do not count it strange, 
For love, to give up acres and degree, 
I yield the grave for thy sake, and exchange 
My near sweet view of Heaven for Earth with thee! 



IOO 

XLIII. "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. 

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height 

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight 

For the ends of Being and Ideal Grace. 

I love thee to the level of every day's 

Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight. 

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right; 

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise. 

I love thee with the passion put to use 

In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. 

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose 

With my lost saints, — I love thee with the breath, 

Smiles, tears, of all my life! — and, if God choose, 

I shall but love thee better after death." 
Say now if this be pure — if in these lofty expres- 
sions of fondest, ideal, yet real, love, there be aught 
save the holiest passion that can sway a human soul ! 
The world knows the Brownings' wedded life; all 
was gloriously fulfilled — so far as mortality permits, 
without a shadow, those rare twin-spirits standing in 
clear light, whose radiance, intensified by the glow 
of genius, shed grace and beauty upon men, and 
bade them reverence the majesty of Love. What 
must have been the parting, if only for a space ! ten- 
derly yearning as the gaze of Andromache upon re- 
treating Hector, 

" When every fear cast back her looks, and every look shed 
tears." 

Without the passion, Hartley Coleridge has some- 
thing of the refined stateliness of Mrs. Browning's 
emotion : — 



IOI 

" She was a child of noble nature's crowning, 
A smile of hers was like an act of grace; 

She had no winsome looks, no pretty frowning, 
Like daily beauties of the vulgar race: 
But if she smiled a light was on her face, 

A clear cool kindliness, a lunar beam 

Of peaceful radiance silvering o'er the stream 
Of human thought with unabiding glory; 

Not quite a waking truth, not quite a dream, 
A visitation bright and transitory." 

We must needs dwell upon the poetic rather than 
the prosaic form in which the purest passion is por- 
trayed, since in its essence Love is the Poem of Life. 
The mysterious thraldom of the sentiment is finely 
expressed in the posthumous verses of Barry Corn- 
wall : — 

THE RATIONALE LOVE. 



c Love not, O daughter of the golden hair, 
In man abides nor aught of true or fair 
To meet thy truth, to claim thy love and care." 

DAUGHTER. 

' I love, O mother! like the morning sun 
Love through my pulses now doth leap and run- 
I love, O mother, even as thou hast done." 



1 Stern, selfish, coarse, inconstant, nursed in strife, 
Man strides a tyrant through the dream of life, 
His friend a martyr, and his slave a wife." 



102 

DAUGHTER. 

"Hove, O mother! in the haunted air 
I hear his voice, I see him brave and fair — 
I hear, I see, I love him everywhere!" 

Better perhaps than any other poem of its kind, 
Tennyson's " Maud M transcribes the sentiment in- 
spired by true English love. Fervent, yet subdued in 
their chaste elegance and delicacy of feeling, these 
verses fill the memory with haunting loveliness, like 
the recollection of a dewy morning among the fields 
and hedgerows of Surrey, or along the blossoming 
lanes of a Devonshire countryside. This is the 
flower of manly passion, chanted to measures of ex- 
ceeding grace and beauty : — 

11 O let the solid ground 

Not fail beneath my feet 
Before my life has found 

What some have found so sweet. 
Then let come what come may, 
What matter if I go mad, 
I shall have had my day. 

11 Let the sweet heavens endure, 

Not close and darken above me 
Before I am quite, quite sure 

That there is one to love me; 
Then let come what come may 
To a life that has been so sad, 
I shall have had my day. 



IC 3 

4 ■ Go not, happy day, 

From the shining fields, 
Go not, happy day, 

Till the maiden yields. 
Rosy is the West, 
Rosy is the South, 
Roses are her cheeks, 
And a rose her mouth." 

# * * * 

11 1 have led her home, my love, my only friend. 
There is none like her, none. 
And never yet so warmly ran my blood 
And sweetly, on and on 
Calming itself to the long-wish'd-for end, 
Full to the banks, close on the promised good. 

"None like her, none. 
Just now the dry-tongued laurels' pattering talk 
Seem'd her light foot along the garden walk, 
And shook my heart to think she comes once more; 
But even then I heard her close the door, 
The gates of Heaven are closed, and she is gone. 

# * * M * 

11 But now shine on, and what care I, 
Who in this stormy gulf have found a pearl 
The counter-charm of space and hollow sky, 
And do accept my madness, and would die 
To save from some slight shame one simple girl ? 

"Not die; but live a life of truest breath, 
And teach true life to fight with mortal wrongs. 
O, why should Love, like men in drinking-songs, 
Spice his fair banquet with the dust of death ? 
Make answer, Maud my bliss, 
Maud made my Maud by that long lover's kiss. 



104 

' She is coming, my own, my sweet, 

Were it ever so airy a tread, 
My heart would hear her and beat, 

Were it earth in an earthy bed; 
My dust would hear her and beat, 

Had I lain for a century dead ; 
Would start and tremble under her feet, 

And blossom in purple and red. 

* * * * 

4 O that 't were possible 

After long grief and pain 
To find the arms of my true love 
Round me once again! 

"When I was wont to meet her 
In the silent woody places 
Of the land that gave us birth, 
We stood, tranced in long embraces 
Mixed with kisses sweeter, sweeter, 
Then anything on earth. 

* * * # 

c 'Tis a morning pure and sweet, 
And a dewy Iflendor falls 
On the little flower that clings 
To the turrets and the walls ; 
'Tis a morning pure and sweet, 
And the light and shadow fleet; 
She is walking in the meadow, 
And the woodland echo rings; 
In a moment we shall meet; 
She is singing in the meadow, 
And the rivulet at her feet 
Ripples on in light and shadow 
To the ballad that she sings. 

* * * * 



IQ5 

" And I loathe the squares and streets, 
And the faces that one meets, 
Hearts with no love for me; 
Always I long to creep 
Into some still cavern deep, 
There to weep, and weep, and weep 
My whole soul out to thee." 

All these are ideal portraitures of highest love, 
warmed by the breath of genius and limned with 
poetic skill and fervor. Yet they are proper to no 
rank or estate ; they but represent a universal feeling, 
and may be found exemplified among the humblest 
surroundings. Immortal Shakspere was but a stroll- 
ing actor, and Burns a plow-boy ; yet their souls 
were thrilled by the same emotions that moved Mil- 
ton and Goethe, and the host of minnesingers, 
"lovers of fair women," while the troubadours of 
Provence, as well as the lyric poets of a later day, 
representing all classes of society, alike responded to 
the kindling touch of love. 

And in the world of reality who does not know 
that everywhere around us the human heart and in- 
telligence are aglow with finer feeling ; that, even 
amid the well-nigh absolute liberty of our own 
republican institutions, and the laxity of social re- 
straint, our land is ennobled by the presence of in- 
numerable chaste and chivalric loves and happy 
homes? Notwithstanding an occasional depraved 



io6 

taste, one may safely aver that the vast majority 
of our youth would recoil from the skepticism 
of "Candide," the filth of the "Decameron," 
the low, insidious lechery of "Madame Maupin." 
It is the consciousness that men and women 
are better, as well as worse, than we know, which 
sustains our faith in human goodness and virtue. 
No sneer of cynic can shake our trust in a humanity 
whose pulse is quickened by the influence of purest 
Love. Indeed, were all else lost forever, the divine 
instinct of human affection might suffice to hallow 
and redeem mankind. Upon it the historian Buckle 
founds the strongest argument for immortality, and 
we may call to mind a similar thesis in the parting 
scene between Ion and Clemanthe in Talfourd's beau- 
tiful drama. 

CLEMANTHE. 

4, unkind! 
And shall we never^ee each other ? 

ION. 

Yes! 
I have asked the dreadful question of the hills 
That look eternal ; of the flowing streams 
That lucid flow for ever; of the stars, 
Amid whose fields of azure my raised spirit 
Hath trod in glory: all were dumb, but now, 
While I thus gaze upon thy living face, 
I feel the love that kindles through its beauty 
Can never wholly perish: — we shall meet 
Again, Clemanthe!" 

— Talfourd's " Ion." Act V., sc. 2. 



io7 



<c Who shall say whether the Platonic ideal evolved from 
the old Greek chivalry was ever realized in actual experience ? " 

— John Addington Symonds. 

"The evolutionary movement," says Ribot, "gives 
the complete type of love. As it goes on, a breach 
of equilibrium is produced, at the expense of the 
physiological and instinctive elements, which grad- 
ually efface themselves before a more and more intel- 
lectual image. 

" Certainly there lies at the root of all love the un- 
conscious search for an ideal, but for an ideal per- 
ceived in a concrete, personal form, incarnate for the 
moment in an individual. By a process of mental 
abstraction similar to that which draws from percep- 
tions the most general ideas, the concrete image is 
transformed into a vague scheme, a concept, an ab- 
solute ideal, and we have a purely intellectual, 
Platonic, mystical love; the emotion is totally intel- 
lectualized. Let us remark that this last stage of 
evolution is not so very rare. Not only do we meet 
with it sporadically, but it has been fixed and ex- 
pressed, at certain moments of history, in institutions 
such as the chivalric love, of which Geoffrey Rudel 
seeking the Lady of Tripoli is the most perfect ex- 
ample, the troubadours the Provencal Courts of Love, 
deciding that true love cannot exist in marriage, and 
excludes all cohabitation, etc. We must not, how- 



TOS 

ever allow ourselves to be misled by appearances. 
Platonic and mystic lovers have always maintained 
that their sentiment is perfectly pure, and has noth- 
ing in common with the senses. Yet how could love 
exist without physical conditions, however attenuated 
we may suppose them ? If they are wanting, all we 
have or can have is a pure intellectual state, the rep- 
resentation of an ideal conceived but not felt." Yet, 
we may ask, was Abelard's affection less ardent and 
sustained during the years in which he was physically 
deprived of sexual gratification? Did not, rather, his 
love of Heloise acquire deeper intensity and feeling, 
albeit bereft of love's most sacred expression?* 

The distinction between ideal and real love, the 
imaginative and the actual emotion, is not always 
quite clear. The affection of man for man, or 
woman for woman, is in truth more spiritual, and 
more unselfish, than human passion, in the nature of 
things excluded. Perhaps no finer instance of 
Platonic love can be cited than the devotion which 
Petrarch fruitlessly lavished upon Laura.f The qual- 

* cf. Bayle — " Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, Vol. I, 
p. 63 (Abelard); Vol. V, pp. 253 et seq. (Combabus). 
f " Giovanne donna sott' un verde lauro 
Vidi piu bianca, e piu fredda che neve 
Non percossa dal Sol molti, e molt'anni: 
E '1 suo parlar, e '1 bel viso e le chiome 
Me piacquen si, ch' i' l'ho dinanzi a gli occhi, 
E avro sempre, ov'io sia in poggio, o'n riva." 

— Petrarca'. C. 7. 



109 

ity of the poet's emotion may be inferred from the 
" Triunfo d'Amore" and the " Triunfo della Cas- 
tita. M In the 365 Sonnets and Canzone addressed 
either to Laura or to his own heart, beginning with 
chastest, most reverential love, we have an undying 
memorial of unrequited passion. These to Love and 
Laura : — 

''Nova angeletta sovra V ale accorta." 

A beauteous angel on white winglets floating 
From heaven alighted on the flowery shore- 
There, as I passed alone by destiny, 
My thoughts to friendless solitude devoting, 
A silken leash she wove, and laid it o'er 
The grassy turf where greenest it doth lie. 
Therein my heart was prisoned, yet anon 
I grieved not, from her eyes so sweet a splendor shone. 

— H. S. 

" In qual parte del cielo, in quale idea." 

Say from what part of heaven 'twas Nature drew, 
From what idea, that so perfect mold 

To form such features, bidding us behold, 
In charms below, what she above could do ? 
What fountain nymph, what dryad maid e'er threw 
Upon the wind such tresses of pure gold ? 
What heart such numerous virtues can unfold ? 
Although the chiefest all my fond hopes slew. 
He for celestial charms may look in vain 

Who has not seen my fair one's radiant eyes, 
And felt their glances pleasingly beguile. 



no 

How Love can heal his wounds, then wound again, 
He only knows who knows how sweet her sighs, 
How sweet her converse, and how sweet her smile. 

— Rev. Dr. Nott. 

11 Nell' eta sua piu bella, e piu fiorita." 

In the full bloom and beauty of her years, 
When Love is wont our bosoms most to sway, 
My living Laura passed from earth away, 

Leaving the shroud our mortal being wears; 

And now in heaven transfigured appears, 

Whence she my spirit rules and cheers alway, 
Ah, why does not the light of the last day — 

First of that other life— dissolve my tears? 

That, as my thoughts pursue, so, hastening, 
My eager, happy soul may follow where 

I shall be free from so much suffering: 
This lot delayed but deepens my despair, 

And I fresh grief unto my burden bring — 
Three years this day had I too died, how fair! 

— H. S. 

" Alma felice, che sovente torni." 

When welcome slumber locks my torpid frame, 

I see thy spirit in the midnight dream; 

Thine eyes that still in living lustre beam; 
In all but frail mortality the same, 
Ah! then, from earth and all its sorrows free, 

Methinks I meet thee in each former scene 

Once the sweet shelter of a heart serene; 
Now vocal only while I weep for thee. 
For thee? — ah, no! from human ills secure, 

Thy hallowed soul exults in endless day, 

'Tis I who linger on the toilsome way. 



Ill 

No balm relieves the anguish I endure, 
Save the fond feeble hope that thou art near 
To sooth my sufferings with an angel's tear. 

— Anne Bannerman. 

"Se lamentar augelii, o verdi fronde." 

If the lorn bird complain, or rustling weep 

Soft summer airs o'er foliage waving slow, 
Or the hoarse brook come murmuring down the steep, 

Where on the enamelled bank I sit below, 

With thoughts of love that bid my numbers flow, — 
'Tis then I see her, though in earth she sieep! 

Her, formed in heaven! I see, and hear, and know! 
Responsive sighing, weeping as I weep: 
Alas!" She pitying says, "ere yet the hour, 

Why hurry life away with swifter flight ? 
Why from thine eyes this flood of sorrow pour ? 
No longer mourn my fate! through death my days 

Become eternal! to eternal light 

These eyes, which seemed in darkness closed, I raise." 

— Lady Dacre. 

" Mai non fu' in parte ove si chiar vedessi." 

Ne'er was a spot where I might see so clear 

That I wouid see since I beheld my love: 
Nor heavens filled with voices tenderer, 

Nor where such freedom did my nature move. 
Ne'er have I valley seen that did appear 

So full of calm retreats, where the hushed grove 
To my lament doth lend a secret ear — 

So sweet a shrine in Cyprus found not Love. 
The waters lisp of love, the hour, the trees, 

The little birds, the fishes, grass and flowers 
Together pray that I may love again; 
But thou, my fair, from heaven, by the pain 



I 12 



The memory of thy death around me pours, 
Prayest that I may spurn earth's loveliest ties. 

44 Poi che la vista angelica, serena." 



-H. S. 



Since the serene, angelic vision gone 

So suddenly my spirit in great pain 

Has left, and shadowy horror, by this strain 
I seek to still grief's solemn undertone. 
Just woe, perchance, leads me in tears to moan — 

He who decreed it knows, and Love, that vain 

Is other power to lure my heart again 
From weariness with which my days are strewn. 
And this one, Death, has snatched thy hand from me; — 

O happy Earth! within whose breast she lies, 
Whose mantle that fair human face doth bind: 
Where dost thou leave me, desolate and blind, 

Since the sweet, loving light of these fond eyes 
No more shall cheer my long obscurity? 

— H. S. 

That redoubtable philistine, Mr. Punch, once ob- 
served that Petrarch deserved his Laura more than 
his lauro — a witticism at the expense of truth, since 
in the range of amatory and elegiac verse there is 
scarcely to be found a loftier, more spiritualized 
strain of love more sweetly and winningly expressed. 
Only the poet's death could silence his long lament, 
though moved but by a dream. 

44 But this affection nothing strange I find; 
For who with reason can you e'er reprove 



"3 

To love the semblant pleasing most your mind 
And yield your heart whence ye cannot remove ? 
No guilt in you, but in the tyranny of Love." 

— Faerie Queene, Stanza XL. 

The Sonnets of Michael Angelo, addressed to Vit- 
toria Colonna, Marquesa di Pescara, who refused 
him her hand, are of peculiar quality, marked by 
great refinement of feeling, yet withal somewhat im- 
personal in their motive. It is doubtful whether the 
poet experienced even Platonic passion as others 
have known the sentiment. The sonnets, however, 
are noble in form and of the loftiest feeling. As 
Margaret Fuller said, " Petrarch ever clings to earth, 
but Michael soars.' ' The twenty years of friendship 
with his inamorata witnessed the sculptor's grandest 
creations, he himself ascribing to Colonna's influence 
the inspiration through which they were wrought : 

When my rude hammer to the stubborn stone 
Gives human shape, now this, now that, at will, 
Following his hand who wields and guides it still, 

It moves upon another's feet alone: 

But that which dwells in heaven the world doth fill 

With beauty by pure motions of its own: 

And since tools fashion tools which else were none, 
Its life makes all that lives with living skill. 

Now, for that every stroke excels the more 
The higher at the forge it doth ascend, 

Her soul that fashioned mine had sought the skies: 
Wherefore unfinished I must meet my end, 
If God, the great Artificer, denies 

That aid which was unique on earth before. 

— John Addington Symonds, trans. 



H4 

Mr. John Shorey, writing of Plato says : — " Allied 
to mysticism is the quality which the eighteenth 
century deprecated as enthusiasm. The intellect is 
suffused with feeling. All the nobler sentiments par- 
take of the intensity of passionate love and the 
solemnity of initiations. Hence the sage and serious 
doctrine of Platonic love — 

* Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; 
The soul that rises with us, our life's star, 
Hath had elsewhere its setting 
And cometh from afar. ' * 

. . . To this throe, this yearning awakened by 
the sight of a beautiful body, men give the special 
name love (according to the Platonic philosophy). 
But love in the larger sense is all passionate thirst 
for happiness, all thrilling recollection of the ab- 
solute beauty, all desire to reproduce it on earth, not 
merely after the flesh, but in such immortal children 
of the spirit as the poems of Homer and Sappho, 
the laws of Solon and Lycurgus, the victories of 
Epaminondas. . . . The love of beauty is the 
predestined guide to the knowledge of the good and 
the true." This takes us far afield ; yet it is the es- 
sence of Platonism. 

A breath of Shelley's muse half whispers the ideal, 
visionary adoration of which we write : 



* Wordsworth. 



"5 
I. 

u One word is too often profaned 

For me to profane it, 
One feeling too falsely disdained 

For thee to disdain it. 
One hope is too like despair 

For prudence to smother, 
And pity from thee more dear 

Than that from another. 

II. 

1 ' I can give not what men call love, 

But wilt thou accept not 
The worship the heart lifts above 

And the heavens reject not, 
The desire of the moth for the star, 

Of the night for the morrow, 
The devotion to something afar 

From the sphere of our sorrow?" 

There is much in the higher poetry of the Italian 
and English Renaissance partaking of this enchant- 
ment inspired by contemplation of the beautiful. 
The spirit of knightly chivalry yet lingered among 
men — as indeed it shines in heroic thoughts and ac- 
tions of to-day — and nations vied with one another 
in homage to woman. 

Throughout the history of human hearts there are 
tender touches of Platonic love : in the rapt, wistful 
tremor of maidenly feeling which stirred the gentle 
bosom of Nausicaa as she looked upon Ulysses and 
bade him farewell forever \ in the gracious and 



n6 

courtly affection of Goethe for the child Bettina von 
Arnim, and the secret, yet passionate, loves of poets 
who have embalmed in imperishable verse the mem- 
ories of early infatuation — woeful ballads written to 
a mistress' eyebrow, yet pathetically earnest and 
heartfelt, as in Tennyson's youthful lyrics. The pas- 
sion in its more intellectual, yet none the less ardent, 
phase is also finely expressed in Prosper MerimeVs 
" Lettres a une Inconnue." 

With regard to the singularly elegant and thought- 
ful Sonnets of Shakspere, it is hardly necessary to 
remind the reader that there is little reason to believe 
them Platonic in the spiritual sense of the word. A 
high authority, Professor Dowden, thus characterizes 
them: " The poems, 154 in number, form two 
groups — 1-126 addressed to a young man of high 
station ; 127-154 either addressed to or referring to 
a married woman, not beautiful according to the 
conventional standard, of dark complexion, highly 
accomplished, fascinating, but of stained character 
and irregular conduct. The two groups are con- 
nected. Shakspere' s young friend and patron, whom 
he addresses in words of measureless devotion, seems 
to have fallen into the toils of the woman to whom 
Shakspere was himself attached by a passion which 
he felt to be degrading, yet which he could not over- 
come. The woman yielded herself to the younger 



n7 

admirer who was socially the superior of Shakspere. 
Hence an alienation between the friends, increased 
by the fact that the youth was now the favorer of a 
rival poet ; but in the close all wrongs were forgotten 
and the friendships renewed on a firmer basis. Such 
is the story to be read in the ' Sonnets ' if we take 
them, as they ought to be taken, in their natural 
sense. But some critics have imagined that they 
deal with ideal themes or may set forth a spiritual 
allegory. Many attempts have been made to identify 
Mr. W. H., the dark woman, and the rival poet. 
. . It is not likely that the facts so long hidden 
will ever be revealed. ' ' 

Whatever be the origin and motive of these verses 
they are justly regarded as among the rarest creations 
of poetic art, while, if they be not prompted by pure 
love, they are its fairest counterpart conceived by 
human fancy. Certainly there are sonnets such as, 

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds " — 
or, 

" Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" — 
or, 

"When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced"— 

and many others which in their chaste form, depth 
of feeling, and profound philosophy seem to flow 
only from sources of exalted passion, tempered by a 
wisdom half divine. 



n8 

Compare Sir Philip Sydney : 

" Stella! the fullness of my thoughts of thee 

Can not be stayed within my panting breast; 
But they do swell and struggle forth of me 
Till that in words thy figure be expressed: 

And yet as soon as they so formed be, 
According to my lord Love's own behest, 

With sad eyes I their weak proportion see 
To portrait that which in the world is best, 
So that I can not choose but write my mind, 

And can not choose but put out what I write: 
While these poor babes their death in birth do find. 

And now my pen these lines had dashed quite, 
But that they stopped his fury from the same 
Because their fore-front bare sweet Stella's name." 

In the love-verses of Heinrich Heine, wrung from 
his yearning spirit in cadences of pathetic, strenuous 
warmth and sweetness, there are notes of the ten- 
derest ideal love. " Du bist wie eine Blume" — who 
can forget its loving benediction ? 

Thou seemest like a flower, 

So pure and fair and bright; 
A melancholy yearning 

Steals on me at thy sight. 

I fain would lay in blessing 

My hands upon thy hair; 
Imploring God to keep thee 

So bright, so pure, and fair. 

This, too, " Das Meer hat seine Perlen," is Heine's 
own : 



T1 9 

The ocean hath its pearls, 
The heaven hath its stars, 
But oh! my heart, my heart, 
My heart hath its love. 

Great is the sea and the heavens, 
But greater is my heart; 
And fairer than pearls or stars 
Glistens and glows my love. 

Thou little youthful maiden, 
Come unto my mighty heart! 
My heart, the sea, and the heavens 
Are melting away with love. 

— Emma Lazarus, trans. 

And here is a less familiar, but characteristic song : 

Full many pleasures have I known — 

Women, ay many a one; 
But as each gazes on my heart, 

She gazes and is gone. 

And one would laugh before she went, 

And one turn ashy white — 
But Kitty wept a bitter flood 

Before she took her flight. 

Alas, poor Heine ! The music of Mendelssohn and 
Schumann interpreted his passionate sorrow, and are 
as an apotheosis; yet the author of "Das Meer hat 
seine Perlen ' ' is not to be understood save through 
a kindred sympathy and depth of passionate longing. 
It is decreed that certain souls of finest emotional 
capacity shall suffer this unsatisfied, indefinable thirst 
for a congenial affection never vouchsafed to them. 



De Stael was assuredly loved, as she was lovable; 
yet in the stress of unfulfilled dreams of her ideal she 
exclaims : " I have never been loved as I love."* 

The religious sentiment, perverted as it may be at 
times — even tending to erotism, as we have seen — 
is yet a determining influence in awakening the saint- 
liest ideal love. Upon the secluded meditations of 
the devout worshipper — the youth and maiden of 
daily acquaintance no less than the anchorite sworn 
to celibacy — there steals a holy sense of " the True, 
the Beautiful, and the Good," as typified in human 
love. There are calm, reflective Sabbath intuitions 
unknown to secular life — moments when the heart, 
alike of rationalist and churchman, is melted in 
soothing, contrite reverie or is filled with bounding 
joy. Such moments are conducive to sentimental 
aspiration, and beside us in our walk, holding our 
hand in the church choir, or sitting beside us in the 
pew, the little love-god whispers to our listening 
fancy the message with which his innocent thought 
is freighted. It is not exactly the sense of devotional 
worship — of being, at least for a day, at our purest, 
highest, and best; it is not the pleasing consciousness 
of our own fresh apparel, or the ravishing charm of 
a certain Easter bonnet or other feminine finery : all 



*" Jamais je n'ai ete aimee comme j'aimei 



121 

seems sweeter, fairer, more delightful, and the air 
we breathe incense from heaven. To-morrow, at the 
desk or shopping, we shall not feel quite like this. 
We have been moved, perhaps unawares, by the 
magic spell of Love, and the affluence of our happy 
thoughts fills us with inexpressible peace and grati- 
tude. 

And to him or her who, obedient to the dictates 
of the Church, has assumed the self-abnegation that 
abjures outward bonds of affection, comes often, as 
we know, the desolate consciousness of an incom- 
plete, vacant existence which no chastity of private 
life, no Christ-like devotion to human charities, can 
wholly illume. The life of St. Bernard seems replete 
with all that is divinest in mortality : one only void, 
never to be filled, one only emotion — to which he 
owed his being — never to be entertained. The 
noble "Confessions of St. Augustine," the infinite 
pity and sublime resignation of Lamennais — ' ' Les 
Paroles d'un Croyant" — are eloquent with spiritual 
power of Love. And in considering these things let 
us not be beguiled by the doctrine of isolation : 
"Exceptions prove the rule" is but a logical fallacy, 
illustrating, if anything, the despotism, and the mis- 
chievousness of proverbial philosophy. Truly, we 
may well bow our heads in passing tribute to the 
"Sisters of Mercy" and similar organizations de- 



122 

signed to alleviate human suffering everywhere, the 
lives of whose votaries are pledged to denial of that 
which, to the vast majority of mankind, is the soul's 
tenderest dream and most exultant hope. Think 
you there are not hearts among these almoners of 
God that at times pulsate warmly with the thought 
of mortal, as well as divine, love ? But they give no 
sign, and their outward deportment suggests only 
consecration of self to the behests of philanthropic 
toil and care, in the service of the Master who bade 
men love their neighbors as themselves. 

Yet this silent emotion of love, often imagined in 
the thoughts of the recluse, is not confined to ascet- 
icism. In every-day society we meet with men and 
women deep in the sanctuary of whose quiet medita- 
tions we fancy some unuttered longing to abide. 
They " die with all their music in them,' , the lonely 
secret of their lives being shrouded under a veil of 
insouciance, or silenced in affectionate devotion to 
others. The portrait of the spinster in Whittier's 
" Snow Bound" is a lasting rebuke to them who 
stoop to thoughtless derision of " single-blessedness/ ' 
As a rule, however, the passion of love is patent to 
the student of human nature. " Amor tussisque non 
celantur," Love and a cough cannot be concealed; 
as Heine says in kindly raillery : 



1^3 

''Dearest friend, thou art in love, 
And that love must be confessed; 
For I see thy glowing heart 

Plainly scorching through thy vest." 

A look, a word, a gesture, may be confession, and 
frequently an uncontrollable sentiment breaks forth 
in undisguised acknowledgment ; for, as Touchstone 
declares : 

" But love is blind, and lovers cannot see 
The pretty follies that themselves commit." 

The trees may not blazon their attachment, as in the 
forest of Arden, but lip and eye bespeak their 
thoughts unmistakably, and a maiden's blush is wont 
to be her heart's interpreter. 



124 



— " The sounding cataract 
Haunted me like a passion : the tall rock 
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, 
Their colors and their forms, were then to me 
An appetite; a feeling and a love, 
That had no need of a remoter charm." 

— Wordsworth. 

There is yet a phase of human feeling so closely 
akin to ideal love as to deserve mention here — the 
love of Nature. It is not difficult to associate with 
human tenderness the fond enthusiasm of Isaac Wal- 
ton, of Francis d'Assisi, of White of Selbourne, and 
Thoreau. They brought to their studies and pur- 
suits an ardor scarcely to be measured by empiric in- 
vestigation, and their lives were tinged with a quality 
too fine, too beautiful, to be derived from vulgar 
curiosity. Of Thoreau, for instance, it is not too 
much to claim that he loved his woodland haunts, 
with a passionate feeling purely impersonal, to be 
sure, yet so nearly allied to sentimental emotion that 
it appears almost to have supplanted any deeper de- 
sire of his heart. Still, he was warmly human, as 
the careful student of his writings may readily dis- 
cover. Note the delicacy and refinement with which 
he conveys to us a love of fellow-men seldom under- 
stood by those who perceive only the naturalist. 
Musing by a woodman's hut in winter, he reflects : 



125 

" Singing birds and flowers, perchance, have be- 
gun to appear here ; for flowers as well as weeds fol- 
low in the footsteps of man. . . . The leaves 
are dripping on the south side of this simple roof, 
while the titmouse lisps in the pines, and the genial 
warmth of the sun around the door is somewhat kind 
and human." 

Of a fisherman's nets he says : 

" The twine looks like a new river weed, and is 
to the river as a beautiful memento of man's presence 
in nature, discovered as silently and delicately as a 
foot-print in the sand." 

Again he writes : 

" Next to Nature it seems as if man's actions were 
the most natural, they so gently accord with her." 

And in the following tender allegory how much of 
life there is, how much of earthly, human care and 
vicissitude, of joy and pain, and the deep tragedy of 
spiritual conflict ! 

"There is, however, this consolation to the most 
way-worn traveler upon the dustiest road, that the 
path his feet describe is so perfectly symbolical of 
human life — now climbing the hill, now descending 
into the vales. From the summits he beholds the 
heavens and the horizon. From the vales he looks 
up to the heights again. He is reading the old 



126 

lessons still, and though he may be very weary and 
travel-worn, it is yet sincere experience." 

And here is an instance of Thoreau's habitual 
cheeriness — an unaffected bonhomie characteristic 
of the man, and familiar to all who knew him : 

. . . " A man [the landlord] of such universal 
sympathies, and so broad and genial a human nature, 
that he would fain sacrifice the tender but narrow 
ties of friendship to a broad, sunshiny, fair-weather- 
and-foul friendship for his race." 

Note, too, how in the following meditation upon 
a winter sunset the culminating thought turns lov- 
ingly to mankind, revealing the undertone of human 
emotion that softened and spiritualized an apparently 
austere philosophy : 

" When we reflected that this was not a solitary 
phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it 
would happen forever and ever, an infinite number 
of evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest child 
that walked there, it was more glorious still." 

And is there not a touch of domestic feeling, as 
well as depth of spiritual insight and lofty resigna- 
tion, in this : 

11 Sometimes our fate grows too homely and familiarly serious 
ever to be cruel." 

Could brave and thoughtful surrender of a trusting 

soul to the edicts of the inevitable be more eloquently 



1 



127 

expressed? Yet to most readers Thoreau's religious 
attitude seems rather that of Prometheus before high 
Jove. To human sympathies alone, moreover, can 
we ascribe a pathetic metaphor in " Maine Woods," 
where, speaking of his preference for viewing moun- 
tain scenery after a clearing-up shower, he adds : 

1 ' There is no serenity so fair as that which is just established 
in a tearful eye." 

Finally, let us turn to his own supreme testimony 
to the warm, generous and faithful, though often 
concealed, emotions which imbued all Thoreau's pro- 
founder life and thought. Here is his farewell to 
mankind : 

' ' My greatest skill has been to want but little. 
For joy I could embrace the earth. I shall rejoice 
to be buried in it. And then I think of those among 
men who will know that I loved them though I tell 
them not." 

These instances of Thoreau's feeling, chiefly from 
"Excursions," require no detailed comment to show 
the exquisite sensibility from which they spring. In 
the nirvana of his half-braminical meditations it was 
not in his noble nature to forget the throbbing world 
around him, though his philosophy lay in the happy 
equipose of fidelity to self and altruistic sacrifice of 
private weal. Only as we are lifted above the level 
of conventional thought and sentiment do we realize 



128 

how rare and beautiful a nature lay beneath that un- 
pretentious guise, and how the most impersonal ex- 
terior may veil from the eyes of the world a wealth 
of tenderness and love. Is it wonder that a naturalist 
of so fine a mould should regard his favorite woods 
and streams with aught but quiet ecstasy of affec- 
tion?* 

It is said of Francis d'Assisi that fishes swam into 
his hand and birds lighted on his shoulder, as though 
conscious of his great love of them. And to White 
there was no living thing in Selbourne with which 
his rambles failed to make him familiar. Botanists, 
especially, from Linnaeus to Dr. Gray, have cherished 
the floral offspring of nature with peculiar regard 
and solicitude. In his Lapland journey the Swedish 



1 Think me not unkind and rude 

That I walk alone in grove and glen, 
I go to the god of the wood 
To fetch his word to men. 



Chide me not, laborious band, 
For the idle flowers I brought; 

Every aster in my hand 

Goes home loaded with a thought. 



One harvest from thy field 

Homeward brought the oxen strong; 
Another crop thine acres yield, 

Which I gather in a song." 

— Emerson's " Apology. 



129 

scientist describes his privations while examining a 
flora hitherto unknown. "A little dry bread and 
salt, no meat, and incredible hardships and toil," 
such was the affectionate enthusiasm of Linnaeus, and 
the Himalayan explorations of Hooker and those of 
Darwin in the Malaysian Archipelago display a sim- 
ilar devotion. 

" And I have loved thee, Ocean!" 
exclaims Byron — and there is no poetry of Nature 
which attains his inspiration : 

44 There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, 
There is a rapture on the lonely shore; 
There is society where none intrudes, 
By the deep sea, and music in its roar: 
I love not Man the less, but Nature more, 
From these our interviews, in which I steal 

From all I may be or have been before, 
To mingle with the Universe, and feel 
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal." 

Byron apostrophized nature, however, viewing it 
partly through the strongly refracting, yet somewhat 
turbid, medium of private consciousness. His was 
scarcely the calmer, more philosophical contempla- 
tion of him who 

11 Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, 
Sermons in stones, and good in everything." 



i3° 



"Hail, wedded love, mysterious law, true source 
Of human offspring, sole propriety 
In Paradise of all things common else ! " 

— Milton. 

We have sketched the varied affinities of human 
passion in its relations to the individual, and the im- 
mediate, more restricted play of amatory sentiment. 
There remains the sacred flowering of truest Love — 
the crown and glory of its divine nature, the family. 

"The end of living is to bring forth life." 



"Virtue if not a God, yet God's chief part! 
Be thou the knot of this their open vow: 
That still he be her head, she be his heart; 
He lean to her. she unto him do bow; 
Each other still allow; 
Like oak and mistletoe, 
Her strength from him, his praise from her do grow! 
In which most lovely train 
O Hymen! long their coupled joys maintain! 

But thou, foul Cupid, sire to lawless lust! 
Be thou far hence with thy empoisoned dart, 
Which, though of glittering gold, shall here take rust, 
Where simple love, which chasteness doth impart, 

Avoids thy purple art, 

Not needing charming skill 
Such minds with sweet affection for to fill: 

Which being pure and plain, 
O Hymen! long their coupled joys maintain!" 

— Sir Philip Sydney. — " Epithalamium." 



*3 l 

In the associations which cluster round the hearth- 
stone the highest fulfillment of mortal aspiration finds 
expression : the home is founded — perhaps the 
idyllic picture presented in Goethe's " Hermann 
und Dorothea" is fondly realized. Here is the 
realm of woman, m which, in truth she reigns 
supreme. "The ideal which the wife and mother 
makes for herself, the manner she understands duty 
and life, contain the fate of the community. Her 
faith becomes the star of the conjugal ship, and her 
love the animating principle that fashions the future 
of all belonging to her. Woman is the salvation or 
destruction of the family. She carries its destinies 
in the folds of her mantle." — Amiel's Journal. 

" And, would'st thou to the same aspire, 
This is the art thou must employ, 
Live greatly, so thou shalt acquire, 
Unknown capacities of joy/' 

— " The Angel in the House." 

• ' I saw her upon nearer view, 
A spirit, yet a woman too! 
Her household motions light and free, 
And steps of virgin liberty; 
A countenance in which did meet 
Sweet records, promises as sweet: 
A creature not too bright and good 
For human nature's daily food ; 
For transient sorrows, simple wiles, 
Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears and smiles." 

— Wordsworth. 



i3 2 

It is true that many of the sweetest, most ideal 
alliances are childless. Fate to them, while seeming 
pitiless, is benignant, and a profound, heart-break- 
ing, though unuttered, sympathy of sorrow binds 
together husband and wife in indissoluble bonds of 
purest affection — possibly the most spiritualized 
known to mortals. Yet at the marriage altar rarely 
does love contemplate a future like this. The 
thought of motherhood illumines the silent medita- 
tions of the bride : the dream of being called " father' ' 
lifts into heroic attitude the happy groom. To feel 
the soft arms of infancy folded about our neck ; to 
listen to the confiding, childish prattle from the 
lips of one whom we may exultantly call our own ; 
to watch the fair unfolding of life's flower, and know 
that it is ours to tend and cherish ; to stand by the 
little crib, shrine of our tenderest affections, and 
mark the seal of heaven upon the placid countenance, 
as though our darling communed with angels — 
Earth brings to us no vision of the Beautiful like this, 
no bliss which so thrills the soul with mute ecstasy 
of tears, for it is the incarnation of divinest Love. 

4< Meglio e morir che trarre 
Selvaggia vita in solitudin dove 
A niun sei caro, e di nessun ti cale." 

— Alfieri's " Saul," Act I, sc. 4. 



*33 

O sweeter death! than wear away a life 
Of lonely hermitage — by none beloved, 
And the heart's passion moved to love of none. 

— H. 



•* 



«l» 



